This page last changed on May 08, 2008 by smaddox.

8 May 2008

The Atlassian Crowd team is proud to release Crowd 1.4.

Crowd 1.4 supports nested groups in LDAP directories. This means a group can now be a member of another group, making management of permissions much easier. For example, a Crowd-integrated Confluence or JIRA site will see users in sub-groups as members of the parent group.

The new Self-Service Console gives you the option to allow any authorised Crowd user to update their own user profile and password and to view their authorisation details.

There's a new directory connector for Novell eDirectory. Crowd also supports read-only connections to an LDAP directory using the Posix schema. This is useful if you have a Unix installation and want to integrate it with an LDAP directory.

For the development community, a new plugin framework supports customised event listeners and password encoders.


Highlights of this release:

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Responding to your feedback:
4 new feature requests implemented
90 votes satisfied

Keep logging your votes and issues. They help us decide what needs doing!


Upgrading to Crowd 1.4

You can download Crowd from the Atlassian website. If upgrading from a previous version, please read the Crowd 1.4 Upgrade Notes.

Highlights of Crowd 1.4

Nested Groups

  • In your LDAP directory, you can assign a group as a member of another group.
  • In Crowd, you can map any group to an application, including a group which contains other groups. Currently, nested groups are supported for LDAP directory connectors only.
  • For example, you might have two LDAP groups: 'engineering-group' and 'payroll-group'. Now you want to allow all members of those groups to access your Confluence wiki. You can create a group called 'confluence-users', mapped to the Confluence application, with members 'engineering-group', 'payroll-group' and any other groups and users. Crowd will allow members of those groups and sub-groups to log in to Confluence. When Confluence requests a list of the users in the 'confluence-users' group, Crowd will present all users in the group plus all users in its sub-groups.
  • Good news for our Confluence, JIRA and other Atlassian customers — this feature satisfies your requests for nested groups in those products too.
  • Take a look at our documentation.

Self-Service Console

  • Crowd users, including non-administrators, can log in to Crowd.
  • Change or reset your own password.
  • Update your user profile.
  • View your group and role membership.
  • See a list of the applications you can log in to.
  • The new Crowd User Guide explains the ins and outs.

Novell eDirectory Connector

Posix Support for LDAP Directories

  • Crowd supports read-only connections to an LDAP directory using the Posix/NIS schema.
  • Initially, our support is targeted at OpenLDAP directories.
  • This is useful if you have a Unix installation and want to integrate with an LDAP directory.
  • Here's our documentation on connecting your LDAP directory using the Posix/NIS schema.

Plugin Framework

  • For our development community, the new plugin framework supports customised event listeners and password encoders.
  • For example, you might decide to write your own event listener to audit failed Crowd authentication requests. Within Crowd itself, the reset password listener uses the new event framework.
  • You can create your own plugin to use a specific password encryption algorithm that Crowd does not support out of the box. Crowd's own password encoders provide examples of such plugins.

More than 30 Improvements and Bug-Fixes

Atlassian JIRA (34 issues)
Key Summary Pr Status
CWD-1011 Atlassian Importer does not import passwords correctly Blocker Closed
CWD-942 Problems when creating users from JIRA/Confluence in internal Crowd directories Blocker Resolved
CWD-614 Implement caching on Crowd client layer Blocker Resolved
CWD-202 JIRA throws DataAccessException when an external user (Crowd) is removed. Blocker Resolved
CWD-74 Support groups-within-groups Blocker Resolved
CWD-993 XML backup does not include delegated directory users and groups Critical Resolved
CWD-941 Allow client proxy and connection pool configuration in crowd.properties Critical Resolved
CWD-25 Plugins System Critical Resolved
CWD-1035 FATAL log messages produced when calling SecurityServerClientFactory.getSecurityServerClient().getClientProperties().updateProperties(properties) Major Resolved
CWD-1032 Fix Upgrade Task 114 password encryption attribution Major Resolved
CWD-1031 Fix XML importer parser Major Resolved
CWD-1016 Update common modules Major Resolved
CWD-979 Change created AD group type to Distribution Major Resolved
CWD-978 Update Spring LDAP to 1.2.1 Major Resolved
CWD-976 Update directory importer documentation to better explain what's allowed and what isn't Major Resolved
CWD-968 Users deleted from JIRA are not removed from the client side cache in CrowdCredentialsProvider. Major Closed
CWD-959 Creation of Principals from a client application (JIRA/Confluence) will fail silently when there is multiple directories, one of those being an Internal Directory. Major Resolved
CWD-952 Upgrade atlassian-user to be compatible with interface change for Confluence 2.8 Major Resolved
CWD-936 Provide the ability to choose an encryption type for a Generic Directory Major Resolved
CWD-934 Online help links for new 1.4 features Major Resolved
CWD-924 SSO failure when authenicating two users in two tabs (in one browser) Major Resolved
CWD-920 OpenLDAP MD5 encrypted password stored as plain text Major Resolved
CWD-903 Configure redirection of context-sensitive online help links for existing 1.3 release Major Resolved
CWD-898 Crowd 1.3 UI is not compatible with IE 6 Major Resolved
CWD-870 CrowdCredentialsProvider exception handling improvements Major Resolved
CWD-782 Textual changes on new directory importer screens Major Resolved
CWD-684 Add Crowd Directory Information to the Crowd logs Major Closed
CWD-680 Jive Forums 5.5.9 and above Support Major Resolved
CWD-547 crowd scans all Person objects in AD when it doesn't need to. Major Resolved
CWD-486 Document configuring Novell eDirectory as an LDAP Directory Connector Major Resolved
CWD-485 Officially support integration with Novell eDirectory Major Resolved
CWD-306 Allow users to manage their accounts and view thier details in a 'self service' console. Major Resolved
CWD-676 Event listener exception during startup Minor Resolved
CWD-569 Unable to store group/role description Minor Resolved


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Crowd 1.4 Nested Groups (text/xml)
Crowd 1.4 Nested Groups (text/xml)
Crowd 1.4 Nested Groups (text/xml)
Crowd 1.4 Nested Groups (text/xml)
Crowd 1.4 Nested Groups (text/xml)
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Crowd 1.4 Nested Groups (text/xml)
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Document generated by Confluence on May 08, 2008 19:38