Multiple applications in one Crowd Directory?

Question

I'm setting up Jira, Confluence, Bamboo and Hipchat on a dedicated server for evaluation purposes. I want to use Crowd to enable SSO and streamline the registration/login/user management experience

The "Integrating Crowd with Jira/Confluence/Bamboo/etc" support posts seem to suggest creating a new user directory for each application to be integrated. However in my usage case I don't know if that is necessary.

Basically, if I want to ensure that a user only needs to register once, and then has access to Jira, Confluence, etc on my domain, would it be fine to use a single directory for all of my applications? Would that break anything?

If I were to follow the instructions as they are now, and create a dedicated Crowd directory for each application, does that mean that a given user would need to create an account for each application independently? (ie. in my case a new user has to fill out their Name/email/password 4 times instead of just once).

As a side note, Is it possible to integrate Hip-Chat with Crowd? It's not listed in the "Adding an Application" section.

JamesT · Answer

It seems like I may have just posted a similar question: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/38830373

If you use a single Directory for multiple applications, how do setup different filters for those apps?  When I look in Bitbucket for example, there really aren't any options to filter the users in that Directory.  In Crowd, there are options to limit which groups can login from that app to that Directory, but no LDAP-like filters in the Application config.  And all the users in the Directory consume a license in the app, which is definitely not going to work for us...

João Palharini · Answer

Hi Johannes!

There is no need to create a directory for each application, however, you could use the same directory server you already have and use different DNs on its filters to sync only users that will logon to that application. But again, there is no need to do so if you are willing to setup a SSO environment for all users to have access to all applications.

The only thing you need to make sure of is to have the required groups for each application on your directory server.

Regarding HipChat, it's possible to integrate it with Crowd, but only on HipChat's Server edition, not the Cloud one (hipchat.com). Here is the document explaining how to do so, I'll also update the document you pointed out to mention HipChat as well.

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Cheers!

Joao