Directories contain authentication and authorisation information about users, groups and roles. Crowd supports an unlimited number of directories. Administrators can use different directories to create silos of users. For example, you might store your customers in one directory and your employees in another.
Crowd supports the following types of directory:
- Crowd Internal Directory
Internal directories use the Crowd database to store user, group and role information. Internal directories are stored in Crowd's database server.
- Delegated Authentication Directory
A Delegated Authentication directory combines the features of an internal Crowd directory with delegated LDAP authentication. This means that you can have your users authenticated via an external LDAP directory while managing the users, groups and roles in Crowd. You can use Crowd's flexible and simple group management when the LDAP groups do not suit your requirements.
For example, you can set up a simple group configuration in Crowd for use with Confluence and other Atlassian products, while authenticating your users against the corporate LDAP directory. You can also avoid the performance issues which might result from downloading large numbers of groups from LDAP.
- LDAP Directory Connector
Crowd provides built-in connectors for the most popular LDAP directory servers (Microsoft Active Directory, SunONE/DSEE, OpenLDAP, Apache Directory). These LDAP connectors enable you to quickly integrate existing desktop logins with web applications.
- Custom Directory Connector
Custom directory connectors allow developers to connect Crowd to custom user-stores, such as existing databases or legacy systems.
You can add as many directories of each type as you need.
To add a directory,
- Log in to the Crowd Administration Console.
- Click the 'Directories' link in the top navigation bar.
- This will display the Directory Browser. Click the 'Add Directory' link.
- This will display the 'Select Directory Type' screen (see below). Click the button corresponding to the type of directory you want to add:
Once a directory has been configured, you will need to specify permissions for its users. You can then map the directory to appropriate applications.
Screenshot: 'Select Directory Type'
Related Topics
Crowd Documentation
