If your Trello account to "asudev" merge failed

Summary: 

• Trello is a web-based Kanban-style list-making application. (Wikipedia) ASU does not have an enterprise-wide license – most Trello users at ASU have free accounts.

• Atlassian (Jira, Confluence) acquired Trello in 2017. They recently moved to centralize account management when there’s an enterprise-level “organization.” See Trello and Atlassian Accounts Merging into “asudev”

• Atlassian organizations are umbrella structures encompassing accounts for products, like free Trello accounts, without centralized account management, and also product sites (Jira, Confluence, paid Trello, etc.) which manage access within the site or application directly. 

• “asudev” is ASU’s Atlassian umbrella organization. 

• All Trello accounts with an @asu.edu email address are being merged into the “asudev” organization automatically on June 1st, 2020. See Trello and Atlassian Accounts Merging into “asudev”

  • Here’s what you need to do: Change your Trello account email address to your asurite@asu.edu email if it isn’t already, and if some or all of your Trello boards involve ASU work. If you don’t it will trigger a bug in the merge process. This KB describes the bug.  

• You may merge your account yourself for more granular control before June 1st, 2020. See Merging your Trello account into “asudev”.

• Once your Trello account is merged into “asudev”, you will log in with your asurite@asu.edu email – your “Atlassian account” – and ASU SSO. See Logging into your “asudev” Trello account.

The merge process breaks if your Trello account email is not in the form: asurite@asu.edu.

At this point (5/11/2020) either the manual merge process (you do it) or the automatic merge that will take place on 6/1/2020 will fail if your Trello account email address is in any other form, e.g. first.last@asu.edu. ASU is working with Atlassian and Trello to address this problem.

Don’t Panic - All your boards are still in your original account, which you can access using your original Trello account email and password.

What happens

If your Trello account email is not in the form asurite@asu.edu before starting, the merge process results in two accounts: 

1. Your original account is unchanged, and not merged into the “asudev” organization. All your boards are still associated with this account, and you can log into your original account using the same email address address and password you set up for that account.

2. You will have a new, empty, Trello account using your asurite@asu.edu email. It will be joined to the “asudev” organization. You will use ASU SSO to log into that account. See Logging into your “asudev” Trello account. 

Consequences

1. You will no longer be able to change your original Trello account email address to asurite@asu.edu, because that email is already taken by the new empty account.

2. The automatic merge process on June 1st, 2020, will try to merge your original account again, because it sees that account is not yet merged. 

Solutions

• At this point (5/11/2020) there are no good solutions. Atlassian and Trello know about this problem and are working to fix it. 

• The best proactive “solution” is to change your Trello account email to the form asurite@asu.edu before the merge. This KB assumes that did not happen. 

• Delete the empty account: The new empty Trello account under asurite@asu.edu can be deleted, allowing you to start again. Unfortunately, that takes time, up to a month, and there isn’t much time before the automatic merge. We are working with Atlassian to determine the best way to ask for your empty account to be deleted. 

  • Don’t do this if you have other Atlassian services (Bitbucket, Jira, etc.) using your asurite@asu.edu address, or if you already started to use your new (asurite@asu.edu) Trello account. You can see if there has been any recent activity in your new account by going to https://start.atlassian.com/ and logging in with your asurite@asu.edu email. Instead, ask Trello for help: https://trello.com/en/contact. 

• Transfer your boards to your new (empty) account: It’s pretty easy to move boards from one account to another. You could move boards in your original account to your new, empty but merged account. (see How to Transfer Boards to a New Account) 

  • The problem with this solution is shared boards. If you have been invited to share someone else’s boards (e.g. a team all using Trello boards), that would have been under the original account. Those invitations will not be associated with your new empty account. Anyone who had invited you to their boards would have to re-invite your new account. Re-inviting gets complicated when the original owner is no longer involved. (We’ve already seen several examples of this.)

• Contact Trello for help: https://trello.com/en/contact 

• Log into your original account: All your boards are still in your original account, which you can access using your original Trello account email and password. If you have problems logging into it, use the “Can’t log in?” link at the bottom of the login screen. 

Once in your original account, you can transfer your boards to your new account (see above), change your account email address once your asurite account has been deleted, or use it as is until we have better solutions.