1 June 2009

Crowd 2.0 will be launched in June/July 2009. A beta release is currently undergoing internal testing and is also available to a limited number of customers for review. These release notes apply to Crowd 2.0 Beta. We'll publish the final release notes when we release the production-ready version of Crowd 2.0.

The beta release does not yet contain all the features that will be in the final Crowd 2.0 release.


If you would like to participate in testing the beta release, please contact Crowd Support.

Do not use a beta release on production servers

  • Beta releases are not safe. A beta release is a snapshot of the ongoing Crowd development process. While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release.
  • Features in beta releases may be incomplete, or may change or be removed before the next full release.
  • Because beta releases represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between beta releases, or from any beta to the eventual final release. Therefore it is possible that you will not be able to migrate data stored in a Crowd beta release to a future Crowd release.

What's New in Crowd 2.0 Beta


 Updated Database Schema

We have spent a lot of time refactoring the database layer of Crowd for 2.0. In particular, you should notice:

  • Improved speed and efficiency, especially when you are using an internal directory.
  • Support for case-insensitive searching. LDAP supports this feature natively, but now it is also available when you are using a Crowd internal directory.
  • UTF-8 character encoding for MySQL databases. Before this release, Crowd required Latin 1 character encoding.
  • Many other long-outstanding database issues in Crowd.

 Nested Groups in Internal Directories

Crowd now supports nested groups in internal directories, a feature that many people have requested.

 Easier Management of Group Memberships

We have improved Crowd's user interface for managing users and groups.

  • You can add many users to a group at the same time, via the group management screen.
  • With the new user picker, you can find the required user(s) quickly by entering all or part of the user's name, email address or username.

 Wildcard Support in Application IP Restrictions

Crowd now supports the use of netblocks for an application's remote address. This means you can specify a complete IP range for an application instead of individual addresses.

  • Use CIDR notation. For example: 192.168.10.1/16
  • Wikipedia has a good summary.

Early Adopter's Guide to Reviewing Crowd 2.0 Beta

Upgrading to Crowd 2.0 Beta

Because of the database schema changes, you will need to:

  • Export your existing Crowd database to XML: From the Administration Console, select 'Administration', 'Backup'. See the instructions.
  • Install Crowd 2.0 Beta, following the installation instructions. Please ensure that when starting up Crowd you point Crowd to a new crowd home directory, please do not use your current crowd home.
  • Select 'Import data from an XML Backup' when running the Setup Wizard, as described in the setup instructions.
Targets for your Testing

We would love to have your feedback on this beta release, and in particular on the following aspects of the release:

  • Support for nested groups in internal directories.
  • The group and user pickers on the group management screen.
  • Performance comparisons, particularly when using a Crowd internal directory.

Updates and Fixes in this Release

New Features

 

CWD-174

Add wildcard support for application IP restrictions.

CWD-635

Edit members of the group or role

CWD-980

Add Nested Groups for Internal Directories

CWD-1337

Provide support for OS X Open Directory 10.5.6

Improvements

 

CWD-84

Allow specifying network addresses by netblock

CWD-310

Mail Template size is limted to 255 characters

CWD-732

Crowd client should pass version, configuration information to server

CWD-990

UTF-8 support for MySQL

CWD-1405

pluginManager and pluginEventManager beans should be available to plugins

CWD-1406

security filter should be added to path "/plugins/servlet" in web.xml

CWD-1446

Disable roles by default on newly created LDAP directories for 2.0

CWD-1472

ClientPropertiesImpl.generateBaseURL() assumes that server URL contains /services

CWD-1476

Allow the Crowd admin to know when a proxy should be added to the Trusted Proxy list

CWD-1507

Crowd Schema + Domain Model update to improve performance and cross-database compliance

CWD-1525

UI Improvements for Group Membership Management

Bug Fixes

 

CWD-1187

Nested groups do not work with JIRA Global Permissions

CWD-1372

Crowd creates new tokens for applications and users even if valid ones already exist

CWD-1398

Content-Encoding is unset for SOAP requests

CWD-1411

Make Crowd database schema lowercase

CWD-1419

Directory Encryption Type is not available for generic Posix or OpenLDAP Posix directories

CWD-1441

Wrong license user count when users still members of an application group

CWD-1459

Group/User memberships do not obey the tree scope or object filters

CWD-1493

Performance issue when amalgamating groups for a findAllGroupRelationships call

CWD-1498

Delegated directory attributes only accessible via 'view' link, not by clicking on directory name

CWD-1512

The runtime environment of Crowd will not allow Roles and Caching to be enabled at the same time

CWD-1514

Configuration Errors need to be displayed for an LDAP directory if Roles are enabled and the DN's for both Groups and Roles overlap.

CWD-1529

SecurityServerClient does not correctly segregate roles and groups for container searches.

  • No labels