Must we choose either Embedded Crowd or SSO?

Question

The wiki documentation (at least for JIRA and Confluence) suggests that we can't use Embedded Crowd if we want to use SSO. Instead, we must use seraph-config.xml and crowd.properties to specify our Crowd directory externally.

Is this really the case? Is there any way to use SSO with Embedded Crowd? If no, why not?

Joe Clark · Answer

Ah, I see what you mean! Sorry, my answer was off-track.

Michael Downey · Answer

I'm asking if there's any way to configure the Embedded Crowd client to use Seraph-based SSO to authenticate to a central Crowd server.

For example, if you read http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA you will see that the official way of connecting to JIRA to Crowd these days is to use the Embedded Crowd client. However, if you keep reading, you will see that the user is instructed to manually edit seraph-config.xml and crowd.properties files. These files (at least at the time I wrote the question above) are not recognized by JIRA's Embedded Crowd client.

The result is I must either choose between the integrated Embedded Crowd client with no Seraph SSO, and using the "old-fashioned" Crowd integration of manually copying files and editing configuration files.

My question is - will this ever be unified so Embedded Crowd clients support Crowd's Seraph SSO?

Joe Clark · Answer

What kind of SSO are you talking about?  Generally speaking, there shouldn't be any real reason why you can't have some SSO authenticator plugged-in to Confluence whilst your users are coming from an LDAP directory configured in Confluence (which is done via the 'embedded crowd' module).

There may be some features of the LDAP connection that may not be supported by the SSO authenticator.

For example, many customers using the Confluence SharePoint Connector have successfully configured an NTLM SSO Authenticator for Confluence, with the user accounts being pulled in from Active Directory via an embedded crowd LDAP connection.  The "automatic group-joining on login" feature doesn't work with this authenticator, though.