Why use Atlassian Crowd

Question

Am I trying to understand what the Atlassian crowd is doing on an LDAP server? It seems that most Atlassian products allow you to point to the Atlassian server for authorization / authentication. If so, then why use crowd?

Answer 1

LDAP provides you with authentication / authorization only. Sometimes more. Atlassian Crowd offers Single Sign On. When you have several web applications, for example. Confluence, Jira, Fisheye, etc., you do not want to subscribe to each of them if you sing on one.

Crowd also offers OpenId, which means that you can use it with any application that supports OpenId. LDAP requires that each application be configured on the corresponding LDAP server.

Answer 2

The real reason we use our audience is to identify multiple directories. We have internal users in the active directory. We have our clients that can authenticate through the audience to access JIRA / Confluence, using the same sign that they use in our application, using some custom database magic, and the application authentication is processed inside the crowd. It really makes things so smooth that it tries to cut everything in AD.

Answer 3

My reason for using Crowd is a little more selfish. I am trying to lower the barriers to sell my group by using the proper software development tools / procedures (development is not our main function, but it is a very big part of what we do).

Since I'm trying to get buy-in on several systems (JIRA, Confluence, Jenkins), able to manage accounts through one interface, it’s much easier to sell, rather than get my manager (and other users who have historically been very resistant to changes) to create and support accounts on three different systems.

Crowd allows me to do this (relatively) easily.

Using Crowd in this way also allows us to create a “guest” account that provides limited access to our data if we really need to make it visible to someone outside our group (for example, to an interested person).

Answer 4

I only had the same question, but I could not install Crowd. Directly from Atlassian docs:

Connecting Confluence to JIRA for User Management

When to use this option: Choose this option as an alternative to Atlassian Crowd, for simple configurations with a limited number of users.

We use JIRA and FishEye + Crucible and we have about 7 users in total, but have not seen how Crowd is very useful for installing this size, however both JIRA and FeCru are fantastic