Admin role needed to add a user

[Sam Newman]

We have a cloud instance of jira/confluence.  I want to give a small group of users the ability to add new users to the cloud instance, but not give them full org admin rights. 

Is there a way to do this?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Sam Newman 

There were (and maybe still are) two types of user management - the original version and the new "centralized" user management.

If centralized user management is applied to your organization then there is a User Administrator role that you can grant to people.

Refer to this article and its referenced articles for more information.

https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/give-users-admin-permissions/

Which user management model is applied to your site?

[Katherine Rankin]

You're absolutely right - there are indeed two different user management approaches in Atlassian products:

1. The original user management system (product-by-product)
2. The newer centralized user management (organization-wide)

With centralized user management, the User Administrator role makes managing permissions across multiple Atlassian products much more efficient. The article you shared (https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/give-users-admin-permissions/) is a great resource for anyone looking to set this up.

[Sam Newman]

Thanks for the information! We are using the centralized user management.

The documentation is very confusing about granting access to particular apps (jira, confluence) etc and adding users to the site. 

When I give a user "User access admin" access, that user can now give access to other users to an app like jira or confluence, but that user must already be an active user on my site.  The "User access admin" cannot add more users to the system. How can I give non-org admins the ability to add more users to the site?

[Trudy Claspill]

It sounds like you have Centralized User Management.

This page describes the different types of admin roles.

https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/what-are-the-different-types-of-admin-roles/

The purpose of a User Admin is to manage access to the individual products, not to the sites in the organization. Managing access to the sites overall is a privilege allocated to the Organization Admins only.

The way around that would be to enable Invitations in the User Access Settings and not require Admin Approval. However that would enable anybody to invite others to access your site/products and the access would be granted without requiring any sort of admin approval. You would not be able to restrict the capability to the subset of people you want.

I don't think that what you want is possible, but there are nuances to Centralized User Management with which I am not familiar.

If you don't get a conclusive answer here in the Community, you could reach out directly to Atlassian to ask them through a support ticket.

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/

[Sam Newman]

Ok, that seems to agree with the testing I did with the different roles.  Yes, it sounds like the people I want to be able to add new users to the site need the Org Admin role.  I'll look at the Invitation options.