Björn Döhler opened his Work Evolution Summit session with a question and answered it himself before anyone could: “So who’s responsible for user management? Nobody.”
That is the whole problem in two words. User management is the unloved chore nobody volunteers for, the licence you renew once a year and forget, the thing everyone assumes someone else is handling. Björn, who builds a user management app for Atlassian Cloud, came to show what happens when that neglected corner suddenly stops being an admin’s quiet housekeeping and becomes a problem the whole business feels. He told three stories from this year, and in each one a company stumbled into the topic sideways, usually through its wallet, its migration, or an auditor.
Story One: Why Is My Atlassian Bill So High?
It started with a LinkedIn message. A former boss of Björn’s, now the CEO of a 2,000-person company and an IT person himself, reached out with a simple complaint. They had been an Atlassian customer for 15 years. A decade and a half ago they paid roughly 30,000 dollars. On Data Center now, they pay around 300,000. Ten times more.
Björn was fair about part of it. Software vendors raise prices every year, and stacked over time those increases commonly reach two or three times, occasionally ten. If you grow the value you get from the tools in step with the cost, adopting Rovo and the newer Atlassian products, that math stays comfortable. The trouble comes when Jira is still just a task tracker used by a handful of people while the bill climbs anyway.
When Björn’s team analyzed the environment, they found the real culprit. Piles of licensed users who never touch the tool, most of whom had not logged into Jira or Confluence in more than six months. The reason is ordinary. Plenty of employees open Confluence once a year to check an HR policy before a long holiday, and never again. Then there are ghost invites, because an invited user who has product access costs you money whether or not they ever log in. That happens constantly in organizations full of contractors, where everyone raises a hand for access at the start and most never return, and forgotten contractors simply pile up. The fix was to clean the environment and then automate it so the mess cannot rebuild, deactivating users who go dormant for a set period while giving admins a way to find these accounts and decide for themselves.
Story Two: The Migration That Uncovered 128,000 Users
The second story is one every organization eyeing the cloud should read twice. A large German industrial company, running on Data Center with 5,000 Jira users and 26,000 Confluence users, decided on a fast shift. They migrated Jira in December, which went smoothly, and started Confluence in January, which did not. Screens in the Atlassian admin area stopped loading, and the team grew curious about what was going on underneath.
The answer was buried history. They believed they had 26,000 Confluence users. They actually had 128,000, once every guest was counted, with a similar surprise waiting in Jira. All of it had stayed invisible on Data Center, never cleaned up, and the move to cloud surfaced it immediately. The detail that got the biggest reaction was the permission structure. They had 110,000 groups, close to one group per user. Björn reached for a comparison anyone who has moved house will recognize: “you move with all the trash in the new flat”.
Their fast shift was the right call, since commercial pressure demanded a quick move, but it dragged years of accumulated clutter across with it. The lesson he drew is one to plan for rather than discover. A move from Data Center to cloud is exactly when you should clean up, because carrying the mess across is expensive. After the fact, his team cleared out the bulk of those 110,000 groups and gave the company something it had never really had, clear responsibility and clear visibility over who could reach what.
Story Three: By the Way, We Have an Audit
The third scenario needs only one sentence to trigger a shiver in any admin. Someone walks in and asks who has access to this project, because there is an audit. What follows is a familiar scramble, a few people in a room assembling spreadsheets, trying to reconstruct who can see what: “they are in most of the cases 0 confident that this is true”.
That lack of confidence is the danger. The scramble tends to reveal former employees who still have access, and Björn admitted that he himself kept access to a previous employer’s systems for more than six months after leaving, which is a problem on an ordinary day and a serious one if the departed employee holds a grudge. What the moment demands is visibility of the current reality plus history, a traceable record of what changed over the last six months and proof that a given user really was deactivated. And because HR usually has no access to Atlassian’s user management, none of this can fall to them. It lands entirely on the admin.
From Chore to System
Across all three stories, the fix follows the same shape, and Björn demonstrated it live. Install the app in one Jira and you manage every product across the whole organization, no matter how many sites you run, with the count of inactive users visible the moment you log in. The heart of it is a user browser you can filter on almost anything. Show me every user inactive for more than 14 days who has Jira access but not Confluence, who is a normal user, active, and not in the test group. You save that filter, and when an auditor asks who has access, you export it in seconds instead of convening a spreadsheet committee.
On top of that sit two things Atlassian does not offer natively. The first is bulk operations, so you can change groups, remove app access, suspend, or restore hundreds or thousands of users at once rather than writing brittle scripts that sometimes work. The second is automation built from those saved filters. Give a filter a schedule and it runs on its own, deactivating dormant users every Friday, for example, with the activity visible to every admin so nobody is surprised by a silent change.
The clever part is what happens to a deactivated user. Björn walked through a colleague he called Connie Confluence. When the scheduled task removes her product access, she loses her licence and gets an error if she tries to work, which stops the billing. Yet her teammates can still assign issues to her and mention her, because the app keeps a deactivated user assignable and mentionable, with the same handled for Confluence through guest access. The moment Connie logs in or refreshes the page, Atlassian notices the access attempt, the rules kick in, and her licence groups return within seconds, with no admin lifting a finger. You can even ask a Rovo agent how many inactive users you have without opening the app at all. The whole thing runs as a Forge app, so sensitive data like names, emails, and access rights stays inside the Atlassian world, and it scales to 150,000 users. That scale matters, because Atlassian’s organization APIs are slow and time out quickly, which is exactly why Björn’s tool keeps a separate synced database and can push changes across hundreds of thousands of users over days, work that ordinary Jira automation cannot reliably do.
The Money Question: Bring the Waterline Down
An attendee raised the obvious objection. Atlassian bills annually, so how does deactivating users help? Björn’s answer is that the goal is to bring what he calls the waterline down. If 10% to 30% of your users are always inactive, shrinking that licence baseline lets you avoid next year’s upgrade or drop to a lower tier entirely. He described a company with 4,000 factory workers who were given Confluence access someone once decided they needed and who never log in. Licensing all 4,000 makes no sense, and as he noted, Atlassian itself encourages you to free up unused licences.
He flagged two traps worth knowing. The newer Atlassian collections licence the same user count across all products, while in reality almost every company has a different number of Jira and Confluence users, which pushes many toward buying à la carte instead. And Atlassian Guard bills anyone who was ever briefly activated in your organization, even after their product access is gone, so those short-lived accounts need cleaning up too. He mentioned, without recommending, that some customers go as far as deactivating licences overnight on one continent to free them for another. The sane version of the same instinct is simpler. Keep the waterline low on purpose.
Björn’s three stories point in one direction. User management looks like a boring admin task right up until it shows up as a tripled bill, a migration full of ghosts, or an audit you cannot answer with confidence. Treating it as a system you run continuously, rather than a chore you ignore until it bites, is what keeps all three from happening. So ask yourself the question he opened with, and answer it honestly. In your organization, who is actually responsible for user management, and could they tell you today who has access to what?
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About Life in Codes
Life in Codes is on a mission: to support organizations of all kinds to work in a more productive way. That means smart tools, healthy practices, and training the people. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner active in Romania, Estonia, Belgium, UK and the UAE, with our team spread across Europe.
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