What is the best practice for Crowd configuration?

[charleslcso]

Hello, I can't figure out how to proceed after reading Crowd 2.2 doc. Please help and provide suggestion. Currently we are using 50-users license. Crowd is to provide SSO for all applications. All users and groups are stored in OS X Server Open Directory. The number of users already exceeeded 50, and growing. The users are grouped into JIRA groups, Confluence groups and others. Only a small portion of the users will authenticate with Crowd. I think the best configuration for Crowd is "Connected to Crowd via an LDAP connector (e.g. for Active Directory), with all authentication and user/group/role management in LDAP." But my question is, Crowd might consider all my 100+ plus users towards the 50-users license. Is the above approach not suitable? Should I store the users n groups in Crowd and authenticate to OD instead?

[Colin Goudie · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you are close to having it right.

Basically with crowd licensing, 1 Crowd License Seat is defined as a user who can authenticate to 1 or more applications.

http://www.atlassian.com/licensing/crowd#downloadlicenses-5

What you need to enusre is that only the groups you defined above for the variuos applications are the groups that are assigned to those applications and that under Directories in each Application, the allow all to authenticate is set to FALSE.

This means only the groups you specify for that application will allow those users to authenticate.

This will limit the number of users that crowd will calculate for its license count

[charleslcso]

Hello Collin, thanks for the reply. Does it mean I can still keep the users n groups in OD, n have those groups defined in Crowd such that the number of actual users is controlled?

[Colin Goudie]

Yes, keep them in OD, but assign the groups that you want to use for users of an application to that application under the Application Tab