setting up crowd user directory with AD

[Reneesh Kottakkalathil]

We're setting up a new crowd instance and looking for recommendations to configure directories with AD. As per crowd documentation we can configure with AD using following methods. Please share your experiences and best practices from these two methods.

• Connected to Crowd via an LDAP connector (e.g. for Active Directory), with all authentication and user/group management in LDAP.
• A Crowd internal directory for user/group management but with authentication delegated to LDAP (e.g. Active Directory).

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hi Reneesh,

Having dealt with a variety of Crowd environments and connectors before, I would suggest not using the delegated connector. Having the LDAP connector with caching on has given us much more control over changes in the past (especially when changing the username format from samAccountName to email field) - just make sure you correctly map the uniqueUserId field to the unique field in your AD.

CCM

[Reneesh Kottakkalathil]

Thanks Craig.

[Reneesh Kottakkalathil]

Hello Craig,

How do you manage an application(for example-bitbucket) users and groups in Crowd?

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hey Reneesh,

We have a number of methods as we have a variety of backend user sources:

• Active Directory 1 (~30,000 staff) - users and groups come from AD based on Group filters. Membership is managed in AD directly, or a custom web application that allows identified staff to manage membership which is pushed in to AD
• Active Directory 2 (~3,000 staff) - same as Active Directory 1, however we may be moving the Groups to Crowd as the team that manage the AD memberships have a turnaround time that does not align with business needs and the web-app is only available from inside the corporate network which some offices are not connected to
• LDAP 1 (~30,0000 staff) - users come from LDAP, groups are added in Crowd. Custom web application that uses the Crowd APIs to allow identified users to manage groups they're responsible for (this was built before the Crowd Delegated Group Admin function was released (https://www.atlassian.com/blog/crowd/delegated-admin-for-crowd-data-center)
• LDAP 2 (~2,000 staff) - users and groups come from LDAP, based on LDAP group filter.  Membership is managed in a custom web application that allows identified staff to manage membership which is pushed in to LDAP
• Crowd internal users and groups (any other users not part of the above 4 directories) - users and groups in Crowd, Membership management same as LDAP 1

CCM