Bringing Atlassian In-House

[®]

Hello,

I have a quick question aimed around going from the hosted model of Atlassian's suite to inhouse. The main reason we want to do this move is we are finding the need for Active Directory integration, and the hosted model does not seem to provide that feature. If we can do active directory federation, could you please tell me how to integrate this? We would love to remain hosted.

If not, my question is, how does Atlassian recommend installing all of their products in-house? We would like to do something similar to how things are setup hosted where you access each of the urls from the same domain and then just change the directory. I.e. https://mydomain.jire.com/wiki,confluence,etc.

Second, do you recommend installing all of your products on one VM or multiple?

Third, how does Crowd fit into this. Do we point our users to Crowd and then Crowd makes API calls to each of the products, or is Crowd simply used as a SSO server that each Atlassian product makes API calls to, to authenticate the user.

Thanks in advance!

®

[® · Accepted solution]

Just so Atlassian stops emailing me, I think the answer is that it must remain hosted unless you want to tumble down the rabbit hole.

[Ellen Feaheny]

Hi ® -

We have helped numerous customers in your exact situation, to retain the luxury of 24x7 Atlassian-skilled hosting and upgrades included, and also provide AD SSO integration with a secure tunnel to your local AD.

With this solution, the users can log into their Windows domain and be automatically logged into their Atlassian applications. In addition, the domain can be set as you wish (i.e., jira.company.com, wiki.company.com, etc.). Also - any plugins you want.

Optionally, for a couple customers, we have deployed a yet-to-be-published AppFusions plugin (code-named the "Atlassian Experience plugin") that "emulates" the single-browser "OnDemand" experience, to access all the Atlassian apps. In this integrated environment, we do use Crowd in the background, for single point of access, user management and SSO between the apps.

We have deployed that "Atlassian experience" plugin for two large Fortune 500 in the last 6-9 months, and so far so good - no complaints, just works.

If you are interested in getting this kind of environment set up, migration of your current OnDemand systems and initial set up of the new environment is included as well; turnkey.

Atlassian usually will refund your unused pre-paid OnDemand fees in such case, given that you will be exchanging for "download" licenses.. really a win win.

Email info@appfusions.com if interested, and we can get your sizing details to properly quote this for you.

Best,

Ellen

p.s. ® - interesting handle, btw.. :)

[®]

@Norman, I don't have any problem with the product being hosted with Atlassian, but having it hosted prevents me from doing active directory authentication and installing plugins. Hosting it with someone else isn't going to solve the issue.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I was not saying there is anything wrong with OnDemand, but there are other hosting vendors where you can install plugins including the aciive directory plugin. That could solve your issue.

[Karie Kelly]

Aggree with @Norman - There are a few vendors that can host and support your needs and it also allows yout o also add plugins that OnDemand doesn't support, which greatly expands the functionality. AppFusion is one; we use Contegix as they also manage OnDemand.

You do have to purchase your licenses which is the biggest up front cost. We had to purchase JIRA, Confluence, and Greenhopper since we used all of those on OnDemand. Then, we also purchased Crowd so that we could have SSO between JIRA and Confluence. Outside of that, you pay a monthly hosting fee - but, there is no additional cost that we incurred to migrate the OnDemand data to our new hosted data. Plus the hosting vendor provides support - you can still go to Atlassian for support because you have purchased the licenses; but, we have had an extermely positive experience with the vendor and their support team. I suspect most vendors that host provide the same support.

This allows you to have the same credentials when logging in to JIRA or Confluence, but you can start your session with either one - you don't have to always login to JIRA. You can setup an application link between the two to navigate between them.

Since you want active directory integration - you would set that up with Crowd. You tie together the two with an alias if you want to keep your current Atlassian credentials and they are not the same as your activity directory credentials.

When you setup your new instance, your URL can be based of your domain. For example, your company name is ABC and you have a domain of abc.com. You would obtain a certificate for jira.abc.com

Hope that helps.

[Norman Abramovitz]

You might want to consider other other hosted vendors designed for Atlassian products.