Adding a Group or Role

Groups and roles are known as permission container objects. Groups are particularly important in Crowd, as they are often used to control access to applications. Note also that the crowd-administrators group confers Crowd administration rights to its members.

Adding a Group or Role via the Administration Console

To add a group or role,

Log in to the Crowd Administration Console.
Click the 'Groups' or 'Roles' link in the top navigation bar.
This will display the Group Browser (or Role Browser). Click 'Add Group' or 'Add Role' in the left-hand menu.
Complete the fields as described in the table below, then click the 'Create' button.
You can now add users to the new group or role. If your directory supports nested groups, you can now add sub-groups.

Field	Description
Name	The unique name of the group or role. Within a given directory, the Name must be unique. Note that the Name cannot be changed once the group or role is created.
Description	A short description of the group or role.
Directory	The directory to which the group or role will be added. Note that the group or role cannot be moved to a different directory after it is created.
Active	Only deselect this if you wish to deny access to all members of the group or role.

Screenshot 1: 'Group Browser'

Screenshot 2: 'Add Group'

Importing Groups from Other Applications

You can also add groups (not roles) via Crowd's migration tools. See Importing Users and Groups into a Directory.

Group Authorisation

See Specifying which Groups can access an Application.

Roles are Deprecated

As previously announced, roles are now deprecated in Crowd. We have not changed the functionality of roles in Crowd 2.1, but we do recommend that you move away from the use of roles in your Crowd installation so that you will not be adversely affected by the planned redesign of role functionality. Roles are disabled by default when you create a new LDAP directory. We recommend that you leave roles disabled, unless you have existing data that includes roles.

At present, the implementation of roles in Crowd is identical to the implementation of groups. This design does not provide much useful functionality, so we are planning to redesign the way Crowd supports roles. If you would like to help us to design better role-based access control, please add a comment to the improvement request CWD-931, letting us know how you would like to see it work.

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