Crowd over Active Directory

[Michael Collins]

I've got a couple questions I was hoping someone could help me with. We've got Crowd connected to Active Directory and was wanting to know the pros and cons of ditching AD all together and using solely crowd.

1. Can we still use it(Crowd) for user management?

2. If we hook it to our domain server, what are the pros and cons?

3. Will we still be able to manipulate permissions on our users if we don’t have access to modifying the members of AD groups?

4. Can we have AD users in crowd controlled groups?

Thanks in advanced.

[Bruno Vincent]

1. Yes, you can still use Crowd for user management. In that case, you will store users and groups in an internal directory.

2. Well, Active Directory is often the cornerstone of identity management as every user in the organisation usually has an AD domain account. Linking your Crowd server to AD will allow your users to authenticate on your Atlassian suite using their AD username and password. If your organisation centralises groups management in AD, you will also be able to retrieve all these groups and group memberships and use them in your Atlassian applications. It's a very generic speech but unless you expose your applications to the internet, there aren't many cons about linking your Crowd server to your AD domain.

3. Yes you will as you can select the Manage Groups Locally option in the LDAP/AD directory connector.

4. Yes, that is the purpose of the Manage Groups Locally option.