OneLogin vs Crowd?

[Jennifer Osborn]

Good day!

We have an on-premise installation of Confluence, JIRA, Fisheye, Balsamiq, Crucible, etc.  We use Crowd as our user management portal.  We sync staff to a directory, and then we manually add external contractors to a separate directory. 

Alternatively, we use OneLogin for our SSO/user management for HipChat.  We'd like to simplify and use one SSO solution for our applications.  So my questions are:

1) Can we integrate OneLogin with Crowd?

2) Presuming we can't integrate OneLogin with Crowd, what functionality is lost when using OneLogin for Atlassian applications rather than Crowd?

3) Will Crowd ever work with HipChat?

Thank you all in advance!

[Caspar Krieger]

1) Integrating OneLogin with Crowd

My understanding is that it would be possible if https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CWD-1822 were implemented.

Alternatively, depending on the APIs which OneLogin provides, it may be possible to write a custom directory connector for Crowd which uses OneLogin's userbase as the backend. I say "may" because it's possible from Crowd's point of view, but OneLogin may not provide the required APIs.

Edit: as @Andrew Wolpers [BlackPearl PDM] said, if OneLogin can pretend to be an Active Directory server (or other Crowd-supported LDAP server), you should also be able to connect Crowd up to it "as is".

2) What's lost when using OneLogin for Atlassian applications instead of Crowd

I'm not sure; it's probably worth asking OneLogin what the limitations of their Atlassian integration are.

3) Will Crowd ever work with HipChat

We are actively working on this right now, but what we're trying to accomplish is allowing HipChat Server to connect to a Crowd server. I suspect you have HipChat in the cloud at the moment, so that probably doesn't help you.

We would like to also support HipChat in the Cloud connecting to on-premise Crowd servers (and other on-premise userbases such as Active Directory servers and other LDAP servers), but as far as I know we don't have this scheduled on our 6-month roadmap (right now).

(context: I'm a Crowd developer.)

[Andrew Wolpers [BlackPearl PDM]]

Awesome insight, thanks Caspar!

[Vincent Mutambuki { Mumo Systems }]

1) Can we integrate OneLogin with Crowd?

Only if you write you own connector to OneLogin.

2) Presuming we can't integrate OneLogin with Crowd, what functionality is lost when using OneLogin for Atlassian applications rather than Crowd?

You loose Seamless SSO and user provisioning which is important for managing licensed users. Having used Onelogin before, the authentication is not really SSO. You have to login into OneLogin, click on an app link (Say JIRA) which then redirects you to the login of the application and fills out the form for you.

3) Will Crowd ever work with HipChat?

I believe it will when Atlassian roles out HipChat Server edition.

[Andrew Wolpers [BlackPearl PDM]]

Hey Jennifer,

I don't have the answers to all your questions, but hopefully some!

1. I have never used OneLogin with Crowd. But if it has some sort of functionality as an LDAP, I know for certain you can get it into Crowd. I've tied AD, OpenLDAP and even linked Crowd servers all in one environment in the past and SSO worked, so long as everything could read/write to one another.
2. See #1
3. The official word so far is that they're really looking into it. There have been a few requests to get this happening, but it sounds like they're having some issues with 100% compatibility. 

Hopefully that gives you some insight!

[Justin Justin]

Jennifer, AppFusions might be able to help you with either #1 and maybe #3. Email info@appfusions.com