Are you managing your users efficiently?

[Marek Radochonski]

Hi everyone,

I am Marek, a Senior Product Manager for Crowd Server and Data Center here at Atlassian.

I would like to spark a discussion about challenges you have with managing users across different Atlassian on-premise products. We are always eager to hear and learn about your experience in order to make our products better and help you to be more effective.

We've heard some of your stories at Summit events, from JAC, from individual conversations with you and others, but we've love to hear more.

One common scenario that emerged from the discussions we had was that for many of your self hosted deployments Jira is the central place where you are managing your users of our products (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, or Fisheye and Crucible). In such a setup Jira ends up being a single point of failure. If they are unable to access Jira, they are unable to log into any Atlassian product.

Crowd Data Center helps to address these challenges and is a recommended user management solution for Atlassian customers who host at least two products.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Crowd, it offers one place to manage your users, groups and directories and easily integrate your identity infrastructure across all self-hosted Atlassian products.

We would like to learn about your challenges with managing users across Atlassian applications. Whether you're using Crowd today or not, we'd love to hear about capabilities or functionality that's missing.

We would love to hear your stories so that we can build the tools that you need to manage your users in the most efficient way. Please add your feedback by commenting on this post and let us know if you are interested in learning more about the problems we are a looking to solve in the future.

Best,

Marek

Senior Product Manager, Atlassian

[Jacques]

Hey @Marek Radochonski,

One of the biggests problems I have with user management is the feature of renaming users (better said: changing their username). 

Although the Atlassian tools let you rename a username. When you do this things like user mentions, usernames used in JQL or any other "free text" usage of usernames do not follow. This is especially relevant when merging 2 Atlassian instances where the same person has 2 different usernames.

It would be great if this could be resolved in some way which does not include updating database tables and fields.

Thanks!
Jacques.

[Marek Radochonski]

Hey @Jacques,

Thank you very much for your comment. 👍We are indeed aware about issues with renaming users as well as groups. We will be looking into what can be done about it given the prioritization of other important requests. We have to approach it holistically across all products.

Best regards,

Marek

Senior Product Manager, Atlassian

[Eugen Zwinger [demicon]]

Hi @Marek Radochonski!

We had an interesting requirement a while ago:

One of our customers wanted to use more user attributes than Crowd is able to deliver (such as superior/manager, address, telephone or number of building/floor/room the employee is to find). And they wanted to do this for their ~10k users from several AD’s (Jira and Confluence are attached to Crowd). Additionally, they wanted to use Crowd for managing these consolidated users (with enriched attributes) for other Non-Atlassian applications.

Our solution: We wrote an extension to teach Crowd LDAP. With our extension (sort of an App, but as you know there is no such thing as an App for Crowd…) Atlassians Crowd now aggregates all details from the AD´s and passes all the attributes to the attached applications via LDAP.

If you would like to now more in detail – feel free to contact me. I think this use case might me interesting for large organizations.

[Marek Radochonski]

Hi @Eugen Zwinger [demicon],

Thank you very much for this feedback. 🙌🏼We've heard similar feedback from other customers. We are considering to take a closer look at it in future. Using those attributes requires changes not only in Crowd but also other products so that those attributes can be consumed and used.

It would be great to learn more about your extension. Please let me know your email address so that I can get back to you and we can continue the discussion.

Best regards,

Marek

Senior Product Manager, Atlassian

[Eugen Zwinger [demicon]]

Sure, we can arrange a presentation if you want to have a look on it. Just write me a message:

eugen.zwinger@demicon.de

[Jonathan]

Hi,

first - your email was spam-filtered, that's why I only found it now. And the email was sort of suspicious. There was no link or instruction as to how to get in contact with your about this question, so google helped me find my way here.

as you said, when using Jira as user directory, it is a single point of failure, that's why we use confluence and jira user management separately - both use the same AD as source though.

My problem with crowd is, that it is not cheap, doesn't even come with a real SSO option like kerberos or ntml and, as usually when you create a separate product, the base feature of the core products get no attention at all and are ridiculously implemented in regards to usability and features.

Why does Jira and Confluence have such vast differences in user management at all? Jira is slightly better/more powerfl, but only slightly.

What's missing the most is some more filtering options (e.g. list users by last login date) and also as mentioned before, more LDAP features in regards do additional fields such as managers, hierarchial structure of the organisation etc.

[Marek Radochonski]

Hi @Jonathan,

Thanks for your feedback. 🙌🏼We're sorry it was sent to spam. We will verify why this occurred.

We are working on unifying and standardizing some of these user management activities. Regarding SSO we are currently developing improved SSO in Crowd that is SAML based. 

We will also be working on providing better reporting on last login date and licenses consumption so please stay tuned.

Best regards,

Marek

Senior Product Manager, Atlassian