This page last changed on May 07, 2008 by smaddox.
4 March 2008
The Atlassian Crowd team is delighted to present Crowd 1.3. This release includes innovative solutions for LDAP group administration, cross-directory user imports and a streamlined management interface.
A new directory type allows you to combine the features of a Crowd directory with authentication delegated to an LDAP directory. This means that you can use Crowd's flexible group management when the LDAP groups do not suit your requirements. For example, set up a simple group configuration for use with Confluence, JIRA and other Atlassian products.
Our new Directory Importer allows you to copy your users from one directory into another — from and to any type of directory. For example, you can copy users, groups and roles from an LDAP directory to a Crowd directory, or vice versa.
The Crowd Administration Console has a new menu structure with an enhanced look and feel. It's easier to find the functions that you perform most often and interaction is more intuitive.
Installing and setting up Crowd is simpler and faster. Database configuration is now part of the Setup Wizard. When upgrading, you have the option to import your data from an XML backup or point Crowd at your existing database, and so bypass most of the Setup Wizard.
To speed up troubleshooting, you can configure your logging levels and enable performance profiling via the Administration Console. There's a bucketful of improvements in performance and efficiency, and many other fixes and enhancements.
Highlights of this release:
|
Responding to your feedback:
6 new feature requests implemented
36 votes satisfied
Your votes and issues help us keep improving our products. Keep 'em coming!

|
Highlights of Crowd 1.3

|
LDAP Authentication with Crowd Groups and Roles
- Crowd 1.3 provides a new directory type, Delegated Authentication, combining the features of a Crowd internal directory with delegated LDAP authentication.
- This allows you to have your users authenticated via an external LDAP directory while managing the groups and roles in Crowd.
- Use Crowd's flexible and simple group management when the LDAP groups do not suit your requirements. For example, you can set up a group configuration in Crowd for use with Confluence, JIRA and other Atlassian products.
- Avoid the performance issues which might result from downloading large numbers of groups from LDAP.
- Use the new Directory Importer, described below, to synchronise your LDAP users with your Crowd directory.
- When a user logs in for the first time, Crowd automatically adds them to the Crowd directory if not already present.

|

|
Cross-Directory User Importer
- Our new Directory Importer allows you to copy your users from one directory into another.
- Provided that the directory is defined in Crowd, you can copy from and to any directory type.
- For example, you might import users, groups, roles and memberships from an LDAP directory to a new Delegated Authentication directory (described above) so that you can manage the users, groups and roles in Crowd while allowing users to log in with their LDAP passwords.
- Read about the Directory Importer.

|

|
Streamlined User Interface
- The Crowd Administration Console has a new menu structure and an enhanced look and feel.
- A left-hand menu grants easy access to the functions you use most often, such as searching for a user or group.
- A single 'Administration' tab holds the configuration options, system information and backup/restore functions.
- In the interests of simplicity, we've changed the term 'principal' to 'user' throughout.
- When you click a 'Help' link, the relevant documentation page opens immediately.

|

|
Simplified Installation, Setup and Integration
- Database configuration is now part of the Setup Wizard, which will update the configuration files based on the options you select.
- You can choose between a JNDI datasource (i.e. server-managed) or a simpler JDBC configuration.
- When upgrading, you can import an XML backup of your Crowd database or connect to an existing database via the Setup Wizard. This means that you don't have to go through the whole Setup Wizard, nor do a manual backup and restore of your Crowd database files.
- When integrating an application with Crowd, you'll notice that there's just one single JAR file to copy.
|

|
Configuration of Logging and Profiling via Console
- Enable and disable performance profiling.
- Configure your logging levels via the Crowd Administration Console, for quick and simple runtime troubleshooting.
- Edit the log configuration file for more advanced settings.
- Read the documentation.

|

|
Improved Performance and Efficiency
- You'll notice faster search results on the Administration Console screens, such as the Application Browser and User Browser.
- That annoying 'POSTDATA has expired' message no longer appears when you click the 'Back' button.
- Search results returned to a Crowd application are now sorted alphabetically — such as the list of groups shown in a Confluence group picker.
- We've fixed the Hibernate StaleStateException error that was causing occasional performance degradation and authentication failures.
- You can choose to store the login session tokens in the Crowd database (as done prior to Crowd 1.3) or in memory (new option as from Crowd 1.3). Depending upon your installation, in-memory storage could greatly improve response times during authentication. Read about configuring token storage.
- Gzip compression of Crowd Security Server output is now optional. You can turn it on or off via the Crowd Administration Console. Some reasons why you may want to turn Gzip compression off:
- It may be easier to debug problems using uncompressed data.
- Some agents, such as older versions of Internet Explorer, have problems with the Gzip format.
|

|
Highlights for the Developers
- The Java client library API has been upgraded. Read more about the API changes and the upgrade notes.
- You can pass the crowd.properties file to a client application as an environment variable.
|

|
Plus Over 60 Improvements and Bug-Fixes
JIRA Issues (68 issues)
|
Key |
Summary |
Priority |
Status |
CWD-738
|
Allow configuring of request logs in the Crowd client libraries.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-654
|
Xalan is missing from the demo applications WEB-INF/lib folder.
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-768
|
Hibernate DAOs for Principals and Groups close the Hibernate Session when adding
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-703
|
Crowd OpenID WAR file is missing commons-logging jar.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-639
|
Crowd hanging client applications, error with token manager
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-466
|
Storing login tokens in an external DB is inefficient
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-350
|
Tuckey rewrite filter dials home by doing a DNS lookup.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-897
|
Generic LDAP Directory type is displayed as OpenLDAP not Generic
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-882
|
Unalble to update the 'active' flag of an Application
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-838
|
Updating any directory type in Crowd has multiple validation problems.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-830
|
Change Crowd WAR deployment to zip archive.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-829
|
When updating a Delegated or Connector based directory, required fields are not marked as required.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-828
|
When updating an Internal Directory, there is no validation performed on the Configuration tab
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-824
|
Session timeout during the installation should be larger than 5 minutes
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-823
|
JDBC connection should default to MySQL
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-822
|
crowd-init.properties value not set error message during startup is not useful
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-817
|
Default results per page to 100
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-806
|
Fix log4j.properties so dates are displayed in log files.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-805
|
Crowd's Add Directory Screen indicates we support Open Directory.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-800
|
When associating a Group/Role to a Principal in the Demo application, an error is displayed
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-790
|
Have you seen the client/lib directory lately? The current count is about 46 JAR files!
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-775
|
Add Logging & Profiling functionality into Crowd Admin screen.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-767
|
Crowd's Client libraries should be slimmed down to a single JAR file containing all required classes for a Crowd Client
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-765
|
File missing in 1.2.2 release
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-758
|
Hibernate StaleStateExceptions in Crowd
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-757
|
Crowd with delegated LDAP auth - update documentation for Bamboo-Crowd integration
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-739
|
Concurrency Issue in client libraries may result in multiple caches
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-731
|
OGNL Exception being thrown when updating a principal
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-728
|
The Internal Directory is throwing a java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 0, Size: 0 on requiresPasswordChange()
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-727
|
Poor logging of a Token miss in the In-memory token cache.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-726
|
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Can't overwrite cause exception seen in Crowd
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-724
|
Configuration classs for the LDAP importer
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-723
|
LDAP Importer, to migrate data from one directory into another.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-720
|
Enable import from XML in the setup process
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-716
|
Error when attempting to remove a group
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-711
|
The HTTPAuthenticator isAuthenticated method should initially check for a token
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-700
|
The isMember call for groups can be slow for very large groups in an Internal Directory
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-699
|
Crowd SSO is incompatible with JIRA 3.12/Confluence 2.7 trusted application feature.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-694
|
ehcache-1.2.3.jar is missing from client/lib folder.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-688
|
Help links directly in the administration console
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-686
|
Sort groups, users and roles before returning results to the security server client
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-685
|
Write System Info page to atlassian-crowd.log on Crowd startup
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-675
|
remove "cache-control: no-store" on search results pages
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-669
|
Adding group/role with prefixed space causes Hibernate error
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-666
|
Persistence system should use c3p0 so hibernate's default pooling system is not used.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-650
|
Update the crowd distribution module parent POM version to version 10
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-649
|
Update the atlassian-crowd module parent POM version to version 7
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-646
|
Move FishEye connector outside crowd-core
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-645
|
Use Spring dependency injection for SecurityServerClient and HttpAuthenticator in Crowd applications
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-633
|
Allow the crowd.properties file to be passed to a Client application as an environment variable
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-622
|
Make SecurityServerClient not static
|
|
Closed
|
CWD-586
|
start_crowd.sh and build.sh fail on Solaris
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-584
|
Adding a Principal to Sun DSEE 6.2 throws a NullPointerException
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-499
|
Creating Groups and Principals fails on 2000
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-481
|
Support CRYPT encryption in OpenLDAP connector
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-427
|
OpenLDAP Connector should default to SSHA encryption.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-389
|
GZip compression is optional through the administration console.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-208
|
Mixed authentication and authorization support for external directory connectors.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-149
|
Config Test doesn't appear to obey Directory and Group rules
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-855
|
OGNL exceptions are thrown when remoing Groups and Roles in the Demo app
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-849
|
Rationalise the path to crowd-init.properties that's displayed on startup
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-818
|
Admin Console: Selected tab CSS needs tweaking for Windows compatability
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-799
|
When creating a Group/Role to a Principal in the Demo application, an exception is thrown.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-798
|
When adding a Group or Role via the Demo app, the description field is not being persisted.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-706
|
Fix logging on startup for the OpenID Server. Stop the logging of Hibernate INFO.
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-570
|
First Name not being displayed from Apache DS
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-453
|
Crowd core jar breaks in Grails, need a new slimmed-down client jar
|
|
Resolved
|
CWD-847
|
Error message is confusing when no directories are mapped to an application
|
|
Resolved
|
|
Known Issues in This Release
We have an enthusiastic and dedicated group of testers and customers who jump in there, try out the new Crowd release, and report any problems so that we can fix them quickly. Here's a list of known issues which will be fixed in our next point release.
A big thank you to everyone who helps us ensure that Crowd keeps getting better and better.
|