Is it possible to change from Crowd to AD for user management?

Question

Currently we're paying for a Crowd license, but the way I see it, the only thing Crowd is doing is being an intermediary between Jira and our AD.  Apparently, when we first implemented Jira, it was necessary to use Crowd in such a manner, because Jira didn't have the functionality to directly access an AD.  With newer versions, however, it seems that functionality was added.  We have now upgraded to Jira 4.3, and we don't feel like we need to be using Crowd for user management anymore.  Is it possible to migrate from one to the other?  I understand there are some gotchas (i.e. you can't have duplicate usernames in Jira), but are there ways around them?

cgauterio · Accepted Answer

Hi Josh,

Yes, you can change from Crowd to AD for user management. As for JIRA 4.3 and later, you can manage users and groups in AD. You can create two different types of LDAP directories: an LDAP directory for delegated authentication or Microsoft Active Directory directory.

On the first one, you can create the directory and then 'manually' move your current users and groups from the Crowd directory to this newly created directory by running a few queries on the database:

update cwd_user set directory_id = ? where directory_id = ??;

update cwd_user_attributes set directory_id = ? where directory_id = ??;

update cwd_group set directory_id = ? where directory_id = ??;

update cwd_membership set directory_id = ? where directory_id = ??;

Where "?" is the id of the newly created directory and "??" is the ID of the Crowd directory in JIRA.

As for the second one, the queries won't be useful since everytime you synchronize your directory, all the membership for the users will ve retrieved from your AD again and will overwrite any changes you have made.

Just as a side note, if you choose the second option, under Permission Settings, I'd suggest you choose Read-Only with Local Groups. With this option enabled you will be able to able to add your users from AD to the JIRA built-in groups: jira-administrators, jira-developers, jira-users.

I hope it helps.

Kind Regards,
Clarissa Gautério
Atlassian Support