Looking back on 2018: Crowd highlights

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Over a year ago, we introduced Crowd Data Center and since then the team has been hard at work improving both Crowd Server and Crowd Data Center. In the past twelve months, there have been 9 releases. We’ve fulfilled 18 feature and improvement requests and resolved 24 bug requests, but that only scratches the surface of some of the work the Crowd team has done.

Highlights of the year include numerous enhancements to Crowd’s audit log, email notifications, and the ability to delegate administration to group level admins. The Crowd team has also been hard at work building the foundation for some upcoming features. Keep reading to get a detailed recap and a sneak peek into what’s coming soon!

A new and improved audit log

Many of you are likely familiar with the audit log in Crowd. You’ve always been able to use the audit log to record changes to Crowd’s system configuration or modify applications and directories. And you can even use Crowd’s REST API to export data to an external system, export data from the audit log to generate a quick report or to meet compliance needs like an external audit.

But in April 2018, we took it one step further. Crowd’s audit log got an upgrade. We heard your feedback that you needed to be able to audit more granular information, such as changes to users and groups. With the improved audit log, you can now quickly view any changes made to users or groups directly within Crowd’s UI in a few clicks using its built-in filters. For example, you’ll be able to identify if the change was caused by a scheduled synchronization, an import, or simply a manual change by another admin. You’ll also see when a change was made.

Email improvements, galore

While email notifications are very important, they can also be a pain - for administrators and users alike. That’s why we made a few improvements to Crowd’s email notification settings:

• Email notifications & password expiration: When configuring an internal directory, you can set your own reminder periods - the number of days before a password expiration reminder will be sent to a user.

• Multiple server alert email addresses: When configuring the email server, you can now send a test email to verify that everything works correctly. If there is a problem sending the test email, Crowd will let you know and provide additional debugging information.

• Easier email configuration testing: You can now configure multiple server alert email addresses, so whenever an alert occurs, you can receive an email notification to more than one email address.

A new role: group level admins

Finally, for our Data Center customers, we introduced delegated administration. In just a few clicks, global administrators can assign an individual user or even an existing group as group level administrators. These group level administrators can then add or remove users to their groups.

What’s next?

Throughout 2018, we’ve also been hard at work building some foundational capabilities for a new and improved SSO experience that we will be releasing in early 2018. We will also be working on adding SAML support for Crowd and surfacing cross-product information such as license usage or permissions directly in Crowd.

As we start off another year, we’d like to send a big thank you to all of you. You are the reason we get to do what we love every single day and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

[Jonas_Ulrich]

Will an improved SSO experience include more modern ways to connect other 3rd-party applications? We're still hoping for some OIDC support!

[Maarten Cautreels]

So good to see that SAML support will be added in the near future. We want to put our tools behind OneLogin and one possible way that we saw up until now was to ditch Crowd and link Onelogin separately to Confluence and Jira (as Onelogin, sort of takes care of the SSO). 

Now that Crowd will support this we might as well keep using Crowd for now (and avoid having to manage Groups separately in both applications)!

[Sandor Krisztian Andre]

SAML support would be great.

[M Amine]

Yes SAML is really important for us too.