How to Configure Crowd Aliases

[Kevin Farnes]

I am currently using Crowd version 2.7. I have imported into the Crowd the user database from JIRA and have now configured JIRA/Confluence/etc to authenticate to the Crowd server. I haven't configured SSO and as yet don't wish to.

I'm now implementing an Active Directory server which I wish to use to hold all the user account information and standardise on username formats. To save having to change all the JIRA usernames to the new format I was planning on using Crowd aliases. However I've hit a slight problem.

Say my user database has the usernames configured a_user, b_user, c_user. My active directory contains the new username for a_user of ad_user. I've configured all the directories and groups within the AD and Crowd and assigned them to the JIRA application. However, when I select the username ad_user and try to create the alias a_user I get an error message back stating the username is already in use. The only way I've found to get around this is to delete the user from the JIRA database then create the alias. However, JIRA documentation recommends not deleting users.

What is the correct way of doing this as all the documentation seem to assume an implementation where the JIRA user database is held within the JIRA application, not within Crowd?

Many thanks for any assistance you can provide and apologies if this has been asked before.

[Tiago Comasseto]

Hi Kevin,

Just checking to see if I undertood it correctly. You have imported to Crowd the user database from JIRA and you're able to configure the alias only when deleting the username from JIRA directory into Crowd, is that right?

If so, there's no problem with this approach. For JIRA it doesn't matter from which directory in Crowd the user come from. You can safelly delete the user from the directory where you imported JIRA user base in Crowd and define the alias for the LDAP user.

I hope it helps.

Cheers