What is the purpose of Jira and Confluence Directory in Crowd?

[Alex Moozhayil]

I am installing Crowd, Jira and Confluence on my server and during the Jira/Confluence integration to Crowd setup I come across this step. 

The JIRA application will need to locate users from a directory configured in Crowd. You will need to set up a directory in Crowd for JIRA. This directory may be any Crowd-configured directory, such as an LDAP directory hooked up to Crowd or a Crowd internal...........

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My question is, what if I just add the Jira-administrators, developers, users, etc. etc. to the Crowd Server Directory? Would I still need to create a Jira and/or confluence directory? 

Thanks!

[AnnWorley · Accepted solution]

When you set up the Confluence and Jira applications in Crowd you will choose a Crowd directory to use with each one (Adding an Application). You may use the existing Crowd internal directory for all the applications but you will have less control over each application's setup and less ability to make changes to one without impacting the others. For example, when you synchronize Confluence's user directory with Crowd, if you use the same Crowd directory for Jira, the Jira groups and users will be synchronized to Confluence because they are in the same directory. 

The recommended procedure is to create a dedicated directory for each application. This will make your configuration easier to support and make changes to.

[Alex Moozhayil]

Thank you Ann!

[AnnWorley]

Happy to hear it helped!

[Al Johnson]

I thought the point was to have one directory so you don't have to maintain multiple accounts for each user for each application.  So, with one directory for Jira and another for Confluence, one user would need to be entered into both directories for access to both apps, right?  If so, would that not be extra work for admins?