How to anonymize Jira users/transfer ownership in Jira

As a Jira administrator, there comes a time when you need to delete personal user data, but want to keep the content written in the tickets.

This is the case, for example, when an employee leaves your company. For data protection reasons, you are required to delete the personal user data. Simply deleting all the processes in which the person is involved would significantly damage your company.

To keep your projects and processes traceable, you can easily use our Data Protection and Security Toolkit.

In this tutorial, we will show you step by step how you can easily transfer ownership to another user in Jira (real or dummy).

Guide to transfer ownership in Jira with user anonymization

Step 1: Open the Date Cleaner Dashboard and select New User Anonymizer.

Open

Step 2: In the next screen, you will see this Dashboard:

Open

Step 3: Then, you can start typing any user’s name (here, Lucas Miller) to select the Source user, the person whose content you want to anonymize. You can also select already deactivated users. After that, you can choose a Target user to take the place of the source user after anonymization.

As target user, you can either select an already existing user, or you can create your own dummy user, which will then take over the ownership.

Now, you can either start the anonymization as it is our you can select the custom anonymization:

Step 4: Now, you can again select the dry run or the direct anonymization and click on Next.

Step 5: In this step, you’re able to pick some post anonymization options should select your Source User and Target User again. Click on Next.

Step 6: It’s time to further define the Scope of the projects, which will then be anonymized. Make sure to hit the checkmark to Include all ticket related content, to not miss any relevant content. You can also search for users in projects that are already achieved!

These options will work properly only for internal users. If users are synchronized with an Active Directory, there may be complications due to the permissions of the Active Directory. All user data on the Jira side will be deleted, but there is no option to delete the data on Active Directory sides as well. Please keep this in mind when selecting these options.

Step 7: Before the process begins, we'll give you an overview of everything that will happen afterwards. Transparently, you can see which user will be replaced by which user and which scope you have selected for the project.

Hit Anonymize to start the process.

Step 8: When the process is finished, you will see the results like this:

Congratulations, with a few clicks, you have transferred the ownership of one user to another and deactivated him at the same time!

If you have further questions, we are happy to help you.