Crowd 2.8 Upgrade Notes

This document contains notes on upgrading an existing Crowd installation to Crowd 2.8 or later. We highly recommend that you read the new features described in the Crowd 2.8 Release Notes.

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Upgrade notes

Please read the following sections and take action where the note applies to your Crowd installation, before upgrading to the new release of Crowd.

Refer to the Crowd 2.7 upgrade notes

If you have not yet upgraded to Crowd 2.7, please read the Crowd 2.7 upgrade notes before upgrading to Crowd 2.8.

Apache Tomcat 7

Since Crowd 2.7 the standalone distribution of Crowd ships with Apache Tomcat 7.

Changes to group membership behavior when using multiple directories

Crowd 2.8 introduces two new membership aggregation schemes for when you have multiple directories mapped to an application – these new schemes are called 'aggregating membership' and 'non-aggregating membership'. The new schemes always provide consistent behavior when Crowd determines group membership over multiple directories.

Please see Effective memberships with multiple directories for an explanation of these new membership aggregation schemes.

Upgrade migration task

When you upgrade to Crowd 2.8, an upgrade migration task will run that assigns the non-aggregating membership scheme to your existing applications, when those applications are mapped to multiple directories. If an application uses only one directory, then no change is made by the upgrade task.

We are aware that this upgrade may cause changes to some current group memberships in a small number of cases. To minimize any possible disruption, the upgrade task will make 'non-aggregating membership' the default setting for all applications that are mapped to multiple directories. We have chosen this as the default to prevent any possibility of privilege escalation –  a user can only lose permissions when non-aggregating membership is applied, whereas it is possible that a user could gain permissons if aggregating membership was applied to the mapped directories.

After upgrading, you will only need to review the aggregation scheme applied to each application, if:

  • You want Crowd to return group memberships based on a union of the directories. That is, you want aggregating group membership to be used for the directories mapped to an integrated application.
    For example, if Sam is a member of the Admin group in any directory, you want Crowd to consider Sam to be a member of the Admin group.

In this case, after you upgrade to Crowd 2.8, you will need to enable aggregating membership for those applications. Note that some users may get application privileges they did not previously have

After upgrading, you don't need to do anything, if:

  • You want Crowd to return memberships based on the first instance of a user that is detected, working down from the highest priority directory to the lowest. 
    For example, Crowd will only consider Sam to be a member of the Admin group if that group membership exists in the first directory in which Sam is found. If Sam is not a member of the Admin group in the first directory in which Sam is found, Crowd will not consider that membership even if Sam is a member of the Admin group in a lower directory.

In this case, when you upgrade to Crowd 2.8, Crowd will behave as you would expect. It is possible, however, that some users will lose application privileges they had in lower priority directories.

End of support announcements

Internet Explorer 8

We intend to end support for Internet Explorer 8 in the next release of Crowd.

Java Platform 7

This is an advance warning that future releases of Crowd will no longer be supported on Java 7 (JDK/JRE 1.7). Crowd 2.8 will still run on Java 7. We encourage administrators to upgrade to Java 8 for Crowd 2.8 to ensure a smooth transition when upgrading to future releases of Crowd.

Upgrading from very old versions of Crowd

As part of upgrading and streamlining Crowd we are considering removing support for upgrading from very old versions of Crowd (CWD-3115). With this change, customers with an installation of Crowd 1.x would need to upgrade to Crowd 2.7 before upgrading to a later version.

Crowd Apache/Subversion Connector

This free Crowd add-on that is available to download on the Atlassian Marketplace will no longer be supported by Atlassian as of 31 December 2014.

End of support for an add-on means that Atlassian will not fix bugs, make improvements, or provide technical support for this connector past the support end date. The connector has already been made open source and is available via Bitbucket. You have direct access to the source and may open pull requests to contribute to the repository for public benefit, should you wish to.

Upgrade procedure

To upgrade to a Crowd 2.8.x release from any earlier version of Crowd, please follow these upgrade instructions.

Last modified on May 26, 2016

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