SharePoint Connector + Confluence + Crowd: Is it possible and is there any point?

Logan G Hawkes

My team has a cluster of half-dozen servers (Jira, Confluence, etc) all authenticating through Crowd using internal directories. We also have a very large SharePoint install used for the entire company. I have been asked to investigate using the SharePoint Connector to integrate SharePoint and Confluence to see if it's possible and worth doing. My research has been inconclusive but not promising. It seems that there are three possible answers:

1. No. You can't integrate SharePoint and Confluence using the SharePoint Connector if you want to use Crowd for authentication.
2. Yeah, you can do that but it's really difficult and requires a lot of complex configuration and doesn't really add all that much.
3. Yeah, you can do that. You'll have to re-configure Crowd to use a Delectated Authentication Directory or somesuch to authenticate using an LDAP connection to Active Directory. That means that all Crowd brings to the party is granular permissions.

Has anyone tried this? Is it possible and is it worth it?

Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]

You can integrate Sharepoint and Confluence using Sharepoint Connector even if you are using Crowd but Single Sign On will not work out of the box.

Confluence uses Crowd Authenticator when using Crowd SSO but Sharepoint - Confluence SSO requires a separate authenticator.

You might be able to write a new authenticator which works for all of these but I haven't seen one yet.

So I guess the answer in short is: Integration works using just configurations but not SSO.