Does Jira have "virtual user" types?

[Charles Swartz]

We recently switched from FogBugz to Jira, and one thing we used in FogBugz quite a bit was "virtual users" - these are not real users, but placeholders for a general category, such as "up for grabs".

Here is a more detailed description of a virtual user - the most important characteristic is that they do not use up a license seat:

A virtual user can't log on and doesn't use up a license. Its pupose is to allow assigning of cases to a group of people instead of an individual. For example, you could create an "Up For Grabs" virtual user that serves as a sort of work queue and owns a case until someone assigns it to themselves. Give it all of the email addresses (comma separated) of the users you want notified when a case is assigned to create a notification list.

Car I create a virtual user in Jira that does not take up a license seat?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Not explicitly, but you can certainly create a user who is not in the "can log in" group(s) and hence does not take up a license.

All users have a single email address though, so you need to set it to a distribution list in your mail system for it.

[Charles Swartz]

That's fantastic Nic, thanks so much for the info. I was not aware that users can be excluded from the "can log in" group.

[Charles Swartz]

I'm not able to find this in the documentation. Would you happen to have a link to where this is in the Jira documentation?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No idea. I suspect it's so simple, I've never looked for it! The users will look like any other user and you add them in the same way (then delete them from any can-log-in group, as Jira will add them to that automatically if you're using it's internal user management)

To find out the can-log-in group, look in Admin -> Global permissions. It's usually just "jira users"

[Charles Swartz]

I tested this by removing one of our virtual user accounts from the jira-users group, but after doing this I could not assign a new issue to this virtual user. So I'm not sure this will work. I'm going to change the status of your answer until I can confirm that this will work, but I am feeling hopeful about this. Let me know if you have any other ideas.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, the joy of permissions.

It's quite likely that you're using the off-the-shelf permissions, or permissions that are similar to them. Much as I understand why they're kept simple for defaults and new users, they really are a dreadful example of how to do permissions in Jira and I've been asking Atlassian to create a better default for years.

The problem is that the defaults use jira-users in lots of places. This means you add someone to jira-users, they get all the rights in projects that you expect and makes it an absolute bloody nightmare to unpick later when you need to do anything clever with permissions, like use dummy users or

The standard thing to do is

1) Remove jira-users group from all permission schemes, everywhere. It should not be used for anything other than "can log in" (and possibly some of the other global permissions. But never permission schemes). I often create a new group called "can log in" and swap to using that for logging in, to make it abundently clear.

2) Where you remove jira-users from permission schemes, replace it with appropriate alternatives. To keep it simple to start with, use a flat replacement (later, you can use "roles", multiple groups, custom fields, but that's going way beyond this question). Create a group like "project user" as a replacement for jira-users and whack all your existing users into it.

Now, for this question, you can put every account into "project user" and they'll get all the rights they need. Then, you remove your dummy user from jira-users, and you'll find you can treat it as a normal user, except that it can't log in.

[Charles Swartz]

Thanks for taking the time to explain all of this Nic. I really appreciate it.