Starting September 2024, we will transition from an in-product to a centralised cloud app management experience in admin.atlassian.com. Admins will be able to view and manage apps in a single view and continue to be able to run all manage app tasks previously done in the product in admin.atlassian.com. The change will also impact admin roles, as outlined below.
The final deprecation of the in-product app management feature will occur in February 2025.
We’ve heard feedback from admins whereas they find it easier to manage all apps, regardless of product, in one centralized area. They preferred an experience where all apps are accessible without any context switching.
We are therefore moving from an in-product app management experience to a single app management location under admin.atlassian.com. You will also still be able to access the manage app experience through the product as you do today.
This experience will help admins save time and will provide a more intuitive interface for the frequent app management admin tasks.
Summary of changes:
Role
Permissions
Changes after migration
Organization admin
An organization admin is the highest level of admin and can complete any administrative task in Atlassian Administration. They are the only admins with access to the organization’s settings, including security settings, and are responsible for managing users and groups within their organization.
No change.
Site admin
A site admins can manage billing, add products, and manage apps for a given set of sites. Site admins can’t manage product access for the sites they administer.
No change
User access admin
User access admins have limited access to Atlassian Administration and are able to manage user access to the products they administer. They do not have billing permissions or other permissions of site admins.
No change.
Product admin
A product admin can manage administration settings within a specific product. They don’t have access to Atlassian Administration.
After migration product admins required to manage apps need to have the site or org admin role assigned to them, depending what is most appropriate for your org’s unique requirements. Find out here how to change a user’s admin permission Give users admin permissions | Atlassian Support
How does this impact our partners?
Today app developers can test their Connect app’s license status through the in-product app management experience. You can continue to do so in admin.atlassian.com. We are aiming to make this functionality available for early access testing in October.
If you would like to get involved please express your interest in the comments below and we will get in touch.
Does this mean, as a pure product admin, I will not be able to see anymore what apps are installed on my instance?
I’m asking as the “manage apps” screen provides an easy way to access information about installed apps which could be very useful to product admins, such as links to the apps documentation, EULA, or support - and it’s also where the postInstallPage
“Get Started” button is rendered.
@SvenSchatter / @danielwester if I read this correctly, the current in-product experience (UPM) will be preserved. So from an product-specific administrator perspective nothing changes and apps can still use the apps menu integration points.
Hi @SvenSchatter that’s correct. Product admins that are required to access manage apps would need to get the site admin role assigned. EULA, support and other link outs shown in your screenshot will be available in the app management experience of admin.atlassian.com
@remie we will maintain “manage your apps” in the ‘your apps’ menu in product (ie UPM). Instead of opening the current in-product manage apps experience it will re-direct to admin.atlassian.com to manage the apps. The entry point for managing apps will therefore be maintained in the product
How will this work for development purposes? Should we now also install our apps through admin.atlassian.com? Can you share screen shots on how uploading apps will work in the new UI?
After having spent more than 2 seconds thinking about this I have a lot of extra questions.
Is it correct that the “Find new apps” feature will remain the same? If so, is it correct that product-specific administrators can install new apps from the context of the instance, but will have to go to admin.atlassian.com (and require site admin rights) in order to manage them (incl. uninstall)?
is it correct that site admins cannot find & install new apps from admin.atlassian.com?
how will product-specific administrators install private / beta versions of apps (private listings)?
has Atlassian considered the fact that large orgs / enterprises might not be happy giving site admin access to employees that do have product-specific admin access? Given that security is such an important topic for Atlassian, have you considered that this breaks the principle of least-privilege and as such might create friction within orgs? Have you done any research with regard to this topic?
can you share with us how Atlassian now considers the installation & management flow of apps? Because the “Get Started” page (as well as the EULA and documentation) is a very important aspect of customer engagement for apps and usually one of the first things users will see from an app perspective.
In my first reading, I thought that this would not change the current in-product experience. But now that it does, I’m really worried that this is going to create a lot of friction for installing & managing apps and might result in additional support workload for app vendors.
@danielwester, I assume you are more specifically worried about the admin pages that have useAsConfig set to true, right? As those will not appear on the left side bar (as per the documentation):
Nope. I’m wondering about the adminPage modules. We don’t use the Configure feature in the app since it’s hidden away. We have our admin link in the apps area right now.
Like @remie I’m interested in how management of private listing tokens will be handled with this change, if the old manage apps UI is going away. Hopefully this has been considered
Does Atlassian have a library of “common” use cases raised by marketplace vendors in these conversations that Atlassian PMs and Designers can review as ideas like this are being workshopped?
Keen question. Not yet, but I believe that’s in scope for an in-flight collaboration with the Marketplace Advisory Council (on the Extensibility Priority). We’re just a little “cart before the horse” at this time. My rough idea is to catalyze our “VOC” process so that we can collect “common use cases” for specific products, or across products (like this case). You can get the issue logged now, but it might be a month or 2 before the “catalyst” helps enhance the feedback and get it moving to the people who need to see it.
Sounds good. I don’t mean to derail the conversation, I am just noticing a pattern of “Did you consider X use case” from vendors to Atlassian on these posts and it feels like a library of use cases can help prevent xkcd: Workflow scenarios.
Thanks a lot for the feedback thus far. This is as always very useful so please keep it coming
The described app management centralisation is a first of many steps to improve our manage app admin experience. It is also a way to handle more complex future app use cases such as cross product apps, as all product apps will be managed in one place.
To answer your questions and comments:
Apps are not installed in “manage apps” today or in future. This will happen through Marketplace. A “Discover new apps” link is available in product (UPM) as well as in admin.atlassian.com. The link will direct to Marketplace and installation can start from there.
Product admins are not able to install apps. They can install 3LO integrations - unless an admin blocks them from doing so - which are not sold though Marketplace but direct distribution. We will not change this.
An overwhelming majority of app management is already done by site admins today. Customer feedback so far suggests the change from product to site admin is acceptable. We will closely monitor the community post feedback to capture customer sentiment
“Get started” and other UPM link outs that were mentioned are available in Connected apps. If the admin decides to not follow through with the “get started” process at the time of installation he can do it later in the manage app experience (see screenshot admin.atlassian.com)
How will this work for development purposes? Should we now also install our apps through admin.atlassian.com? Can you share screen shots on how uploading apps will work in the new UI?
how will product-specific administrators install private / beta versions of apps (private listings)?
To address this point in more detail, the feature was replicated in the “Settings” tab (admittedly a bit hard to discover currently).
It’s available with the “Install a private app” and “Install an unlisted app” buttons (depending on whether or not it’s on marketplace).
Clicking one of the bottom buttons will open this modal:
Which can be submitted to install such apps for development/testing purposes (and for private apps). As mentioned, license testing part of this flow will be released shortly, but installations have been available for a year or two albeit slightly hidden.
I’m afraid that’s not entirely true. The “Upload app” is an essential part of working with apps in the Atlassian ecosystem. Not just for developer, but also for administrators.
Also, I never said that they were installed through “Manage apps”. I said it was installed through “Find new apps”, which is now indeed called “Discover new apps”. And even though you are right that product specific administrators cannot install them (this was new to me), site admins can install apps directly from the instance:
Just for clarity, so that everyone understands what this change means for app developers and administrators, I’ve made a video comparison of managing an app in the new Connected Apps flow and in the current UPM flow. Let’s make it an interactive game of counting the number of required clicks, shall we?
I’m happy to hear that there will be many more improvements! But maybe we can keep the current flow intact until those improvements have been implemented? The current in-product “Manage apps” section isn’t really hurting anyone, is it? Whilst we already know that removing it will hurt productivity for instance for Atlassian Marketplace Partners.
Alternatively, maybe you can just keep the “Manage apps” section for instances that have the " Atlassian Marketplace Support Extensions" app installed? That would at least make life a bit easier for Marketplace Partners.
