How to sync the manager attribute into Atlassian Home with Azure AD

Atlassian determines the manager of a user by taking the value received for the manager field (manager) and looking up a match by either email (if the value was an email) or user id (if the value was an id). Think about the manager as a reference to another person.

If you have stored the manager information in Azure AD using its native manager field, Azure AD will send us the value as the manager ID, so you don’t need to worry about this. If you’re storing the manager value in a custom field, you need to ensure that the value is either the email or the ID of the manager.

For example, here is the simple reporting line consisting of three people, where the top manager (the right-most person) doesn't have the manager set. This is usually the case with the company's Founders, CEOs, etc.

In this case, the reference is made via the email value (notice the values for the manager field in the blue boxes and how they refer to the person's manager).

And here is the same example but with the references made via the user IDs (notice the values for the manager filed in the blue boxes and how they refer to the person's manager).

Step 1: Add the manager attribute mapping

1. In Azure, navigate to the Atlassian Cloud app by clicking on “Azure Active Directory → Enterprise Applications (under “manage” in the left-side bar) → Atlassian Cloud”;

2. Click “Provisioning” under the Manage left side-bar, then “Edit attribute mappings“

3. Click Provision Azure → Active Directory Users;

4. Click the “Add New Mapping” button at the bottom of the screen;

5. Select manager (or your custom field) as the “Source attribute” and urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:manager as the “Target attribute“ and hit OK;

6. You should see the manager in the list of Attribute mappings. Click Save.

Step 2: Re-sync your users

Azure AD will automatically re-sync all the assigned groups/users once the attribute mapping changes are saved. Check the provisioning logs to confirm at the “Atlassian Cloud → Provisioning” tab.

You can also check the syncing on the Atlassian side by visiting admin.atlassian.com and navigating to “Security → Identity Providers → Your Azure Directory”, and checking the “User provisioning” info.

Once the sync is complete, visit a user profile in Atlassian Home, Jira, or Confluence to see the new section for “Reporting lines“, which shows the user’s manager and direct reports or peers.

Troubleshooting

I don't see the manager attribute in step 5

Follow these steps to manually add the manager to the list of available attributes. The attribute should be named exactly as defined here: urn:ietf:params:scim:schemas:extension:enterprise:2.0:User:manager

Still having a problem with following the steps above?

Contact us through the “give feedback” button in the navigation bar of Atlassian Home, and we’ll assist you.