Using crowd directory with more than one Jira instance (each of which has different user license)

Question

Hi guys,

I've never been able to figure this one out. Let's say I have a user directory in crowd that has 700 users. A group in that directory has 10 users.

Okay -- now I have 2 Jira instances, one with a 500 user limit, the other with 2000. I don't care (in fact I want) all 700 to be in the 2000 user jira. But I want only the 10 users from this particular group in the directory to apply to the other Jira. With me so far?

Right -- so in Crowd, for the application where I only want 10 users, I add the directory, mark all users can authenticate as false, and specify the group with the 10 users I want.

The use case here is for a handful of users to have internal access rights, but everyone to have external access rights. (We acquired a company, and are absorbing them into our environment).

Unfortunately, when I sync my internal Jira instance (the 500 user one) -- it pulls in all users towards my license, exceeding my limit. It's pretty much saying to me -- "Yeah, I don't care that you specified that you don't want everyone to authenticate -- I am adding them all. Enjoy!"

-- these users are local, not ldap

Is there a way to accomplish this? Seems to me I should be able to dictate which users can authenticate to my applications, regardless of directory.

Anyway -- there you go. Frustrating situation. I know I could create the users in a separate group or directory, but I don't feel like I should have to. That's wasted replication of effort. ;)

Caspar Krieger · Accepted Answer

There's no nice way to accomplish that, short of some custom development or separate directories / groups as you mentioned. The set of constraints leading to this unfortunate situation is that

* connected applications (JIRA) may still need to "see" users who cannot authenticate (e.g. disabled users who have left the company but created issues), so Crowd can't sync a subset of users
* connected applications themselves decide which users count towards the license limit, generally without checking whether each user can authenticate to Crowd or not (e.g. based on group membership)
* Crowd has no way to only expose a subset of users for syncing to a connected application

So yep, the cleanest work around is probably to get each JIRA instance to use separate "user can use JIRA" groups.