Can Crowd and SSO be implemented separately?

[Janene Hoffmann]

SSO is a feature of Crowd

Therefore, SSO can be used to authenticate to the Atlassian suite, JIRA, Confluence and JSD. 
AND Crowd used to manage Atlassian suite users?

 image2017-1-3 13:3:13.png

Currently users are managed internally in each JIRA, Confluence and JSD which is very labor intensive.

If Crowd is implemented, with the inclusion of SSO for authentication as on this diagram, does SSO nullify Crowd?

Converting internal users to Crowd should have no impact on existing SSO?

Your insight is appreciated.

image2017-1-3 13:3:13.png ‏68 KB

[Marcin Kempa · Accepted solution]

Hi @Janene Hoffmann

From your diagram I read that you are using SAML SSO with a separate IDP. The SSO provided by Crowd does not implement SAML specification. However you may use Crowd only for authorisation and user management just like any other external directory and still take advantage of other ways of authentication like SAML SSO.

Using Crowd for user management does not imply that products connected to it must use the SSO provided by Crowd. Therefore implementing Crowd and exporting internal users from products to it should not have any impact on existing SSO solution you are using.

As a side note, since you are using SAML SSO, you may be interested in latest JIRA 7.3 Data Center releases which comes with SAML integration out of the box.

[Janene Hoffmann]

Thank you for helping me understand what has been designed!  Obviously I'm not familiar with SSO nor Crowd, but need to get up to speed quickly. Also, before I get too far into converting Internal Directory to Crowd, I need to feel confident of the path I've been directed towards. 
So I can convert all the Internal Directory groups and users to Crowd without impacting SSO.
Thank you for the clarification!

[Lars Olav Velle]

Hello Janene!

In case you havent implemented SSO yet, you might want to check out Kantega Single Sign-on.

We do SSO with Kerberos and SAML even for users in the internal directories.

Have a look at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=kantega 

If you need any assistance, email us at SSO@kantega.no