User Licensing

Question

We're currently using BitBucket as our internal user authentication. We have a starter license (10 users) and would like to implement Crowd as we are going to start using Bamboo and Jira, which we also have a starter license (50 users). My question is, if we authenticated using Crowd, is that still limiting us to only 10 users for BitBucket even though we can create 50 in Crowd?

Marcin Kempa · Answer

Hi @Jimmy Sauvegeau

You can create more users in Crowd then there are license seats in products connected to Crowd. The thing is that you need to maintain proper group memberships so that only users who need to use Bitbucket would be able to login and then consume the license.

Consider following example:

* Let's say that in your organization you have 50 people
* 10 of them needs to have access to Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo. Let's call them dev team
* 40 remaining ones (but different than those 10 from dev team) needs to have access to Confluence and Jira. Let's call those users office team (mind that those are not the same that 10 users from dev team).
* So we have 50 unique users

Now you can have following setup:

* Bitbucket and Bamboo with 10 users license tier for dev team only
* Jira and Confluence with 50 users license tier for all your users
* For Crowd you will need 50 users license as Crowd counts unique active users that can authenticate to itself and / or applications connected to it

In order to achieve that you may do following:

* In Bitbucket control the access to it via group bitbucket-users
* In Bamboo control the access to it  via group bamboo-users
* In Jira control the access to it via group jira-users
* In Confluence control the access to it via confluence-users

In Crowd now you would need to assign 10 users from dev team to groups: bitbucket-users, bamboo-users, jira-users, confluence-users

and 40 users from office team (from this example) groups: jira-users, confluence-users

Additionally when you configure all those applications you could select only those groups that are allowed to authenticate to specific product (jira-users group for Jira etc.)

Please mind that it is generally a good practice to have some free license seats available to be prepared for future growth. So if you have 10 users already I would recommend having bigger license than only for those 10 users.

If you do not want to configure memberships by your own but you would like your users automatically assigned to those groups once they try to login to products they need you could use Crowd's default groups. You can read more about this here:

* https://confluence.atlassian.com/crowd/automatically-assigning-users-to-groups-194806197.html
* https://www.atlassian.com/blog/crowd/improve-license-utilization-atlassian-products-crowd-3-1

You may also find following webinars interesting:

* https://www.atlassian.com/webinars/software/centralize-identity-management-using-crowd-data-center
* https://www.atlassian.com/webinars/software/managing-your-atlassian-users-as-you-grow-crowds-tips-and-tricks

Hope that helps,

Marcin Kempa

Jimmy Sauvegeau · Answer

Hi Marcin,

That's what I figured, just wanted to confirm. So does that mean I shouldn't create more than 10 users in Crowd if I connect it to BitBucket? We are planning to use Bamboo and Jira, which I believe we also have 10 user licenses for, can you theoretically have 30 users in crowd, 10 allocated to each application? Or will all 30 users sync to each application? Would I need a 50 user license across the board?

Marcin Kempa · Answer

Hi @Jimmy Sauvegeau ,

Each of the products counts license seats separately. So even though you can create 50 users in Crowd (and you have license for 50 users in Crowd as well) Bitbucket will still only allow 10 users with a 'use' permission, as the license in Bitbucket is just for this amount.

A 'use' permission means that the user is in certain group that allows such user to log in.

Important thing to remember is that when you connect Bitbucket (with license only for 10 users) to Crowd and if you have 50 users in Crowd's directory that is assigned to Bitbucket as well, all those users will by synchronized to Bitbucket. If they have assigned group that allows them also to login to Bitbucket those users will start consuming license which will exceed it. According to this FAQ you will then have 24 hours of grace period to resolve the problem. If you do not resolve it, users in Bitbucket will not be able to push commits to repositories until you restrict the number of active users to match your license or you upgrade your current license.

Please also note that in Crowd only users that are active and can authenticate to Crowd itself or to other applications that are connected to Crowd will consume Crowd's license seat.

Hope that helps,

Marcin Kempa