For people who are new to Jira, it is often confusing when it comes to distinguishing between a Jira System Administrator and a Jira Administrator. For the most part, both are identical, and they can carry out most of the administrative functions in Jira.
The difference is that Jira Administrators cannot access functions that can affect the application environment or network, while a Jira System Administrator has access to everything.
While it can be useful to separate these two, in most cases, it is not necessary. By default, the jira-administrators group has both the Jira System Administrators and Jira Administrators permissions.
The following list shows examples of system operations that are only available to people with Jira System Administrators permission:
- Configuring SMTP server details
- Configuring the CVS source code repository
- Configuring listeners
- Configuring services
- Configuring where Jira stores index files
- Importing data into Jira from an XML backup
- Exporting data from Jira to an XML backup
- Configuring attachment settings
- Accessing Jira license details
- Granting/revoking Jira System Administrators global permission
- Deleting users with Jira System Administrators global permission