Why use Atlassian Crowd

Question

I'm trying to understand what Atlassian crowd does over an LDAP server? It looks like most Atlassian products allow you to point to an Atlassian server for authorization/authentication. If that's the case why use Crowd?

Answer 1

LDAP provides you just Authentication/Authorization. Sometimes more. Atlassian Crowd offers Single Sign On. When you have multiple web apps, e.g. Confluence, Jira, Fisheye, etc you don't want to sign on to each one of them, if you're singed in on one.

Also Crowd offers OpenId, which means that you can use it with any app that supports OpenId. LDAP requires configuration of each application to the corresponding LDAP Server.

Answer 2

My reason for using Crowd is a little more selfish. I'm trying to lower the barriers to sell my group on using proper software development tools/procedures (development isn't our core function, but it is a very large part of what we do).

Since I'm trying to get buy-in on multiple systems (JIRA, Confluence, Jenkins) being able to manage accounts through a single interface is much easier to sell rather than having to get my manager (and other users that have historically been highly resistant to change) to create and maintain accounts in three different systems.

Crowd lets me do this in a (relatively) easy way.

Using Crowd this way also lets us create a 'guest' account that provides restricted access to our data if we do happen to need to make it visible to someone outside our group (like a stakeholder for example).

Answer 3

I just had this same question but ended up not installing Crowd. Directly from Atlassian's docs:

Connecting Confluence to JIRA for User Management

When to use this option: Choose this option as an alternative to Atlassian Crowd, for simple configurations with a limited number of users.

We use JIRA and FishEye+Crucible and have about 7 users overall but didn't see Crowd giving much benefit for that size installation, however both JIRA and FeCru are fantastic

Answer 4

The real reason we use crowd is for multiple directory authentication. We have our internal users in active directory. We have our customers that can authenticate through crowd to access JIRA/Confluence using the same sign on they use in our application through some custom database magic, and application authentication is handled internally by crowd. It's really just makes things so much smoother, than trying to cram everything into AD.