Crowd 5.3 Upgrade Notes
19 April, 2024
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Crowd 5.3. To learn about new features, check out the release notes.
Upgrade notes
Here's some important information you should know about:
End of support for Server licenses
Crowd 5.3 is the first Data Center-only release and doesn’t support Server licenses. If you have a Server license, learn more about your options. With Atlassian Server end of support, you’ll need to ensure you have a valid Data Center license before upgrading to Crowd 5.3.
LDAP synchronization improvements
We've improved the speed, performance, and memory usage of the LDAP full and incremental synchronization process. The feature is turned on by default and will be automatically enabled after updating to Crowd 5.3.
Disable the feature
While we don’t recommend disabling this feature as it might improve performance by using less memory than before, it’s possible to do so in case of any issues. There are a few ways to disable this feature:
Disable the feature by setting the system property
crowd.use.legacy.ad.membership.synctotrueand restarting Crowd.We switched to using both
usnChangedandObjectGUIDbetween internal and remote directory when looking for changes since the last incremental synchronization. In case of any issues, you can switch back to legacy mode (based onusnChangedonly) by setting the system propertycrowd.use.legacy.ad.incremental.synctotrueand restarting Crowd.We also introduced up-front membership retrieval—caching group memberships. If you enabled
crowd.use.legacy.ad.membership.syncand still have issues, you can disable memberships caching by setting the system propertycom.atlassian.crowd.directory.synchronisation.cache.GroupUserCache.disabledtotrueand restarting Crowd.
CrowdID and OpenID client removal
In Crowd 5.3, we’ve removed the integrated OpenID web apps from the distribution to make Crowd deployments more secure. This change has no impact if you weren’t using the web apps. If you were, we recommend switching to another OpenID provider.
If you installed Crowd with integrated apps, you won’t lose your configuration. Crowd 5.3 will start normally but the integrated apps won’t work. If your Crowd deployment is relying on the OpenID integration for user login, you need to switch to another OpenID provider on your older version of Crowd and only then migrate to Crowd 5.3.
Even though as a short-term solution you can still use the OpenID web apps bundled with Crowd 5.2 distribution, we don’t recommend it as they're considered a security risk.
Crowd 5.3.4: Name change from Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID
Due to Microsoft’s name change from Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to Microsoft Entra ID, we’ve updated all the references to Azure AD. The changes include:
Crowd console UI messages
Crowd logs -
atlassian-crowd.logIf you have any integrations of log scanners that rely on the ‘Azure' keyword in a log message, consider updating these to 'Microsoft Entra ID’ to make sure they work correctly after upgrading Crowd.
Product documentation
Javadocs
REST docs
Supported platforms
Crowd 5.3 will be the last version to provide support for OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 in favor of OpenJDK 17. Crowd 5.3 will also be the last version to support connecting to the database using JNDI.
App developers
Crowd REST API was upgraded from Jackson/Jersey v1 to v2. The new implementation works the same way as the original one and there should be no impact on app development.