Planning your Environment

This section provides guidelines on planning the infrastructure and configuration necessary to support your installation of the Confluence SharePoint Connector.

On this page:

Prerequisites and Supported Platforms

Please ensure you read through and comply with the following requirements before installing the SharePoint Connector.

Windows

The Confluence SharePoint Connector supports the same Windows operating system requirements as those specified by Microsoft for SharePoint.

Confluence

You need Confluence 2.8.0 or later. You can download Confluence from the Confluence download centre.

SharePoint

All released versions of the SharePoint Connector support the 2007 Microsoft Office Server System. This includes Windows SharePoint Services ('WSS') 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server ('MOSS') 2007. For a quick guide to the different SharePoint versions available, see our comparison of SharePoint versions and editions. Some features of the SharePoint Connector are only available when using MOSS, as described below.

1. You will need Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0.
   • To check if WSS is installed, go to Start -> All Programs -> Administrative Tools -> SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. If you can see 'SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration', then WSS 3.0 has already been installed.
     
     
2. (Optional) For added functionality, you need Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 (Standard or Enterprise)
   • MOSS is required for the following features:
     1. For the Federated Search feature. For more information, see Configuring the SharePoint Federated Search.
     2. For Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality from SharePoint using Windows Integrated Authentication to Confluence via Forms Based Authentication. For more information, see the Microsoft product information.
   • For the Confluence SharePoint Connector, it makes no difference whether you have MOSS Standard or MOSS Enterprise edition.

Checking whether you have WSS or MOSS

Table: SharePoint Connector feature compatibility matrix

Supported Configurations

Next, please decide which of the supported configurations is best suited to your environment. There are two areas to consider when setting up the SharePoint Connector and deciding which authentication methods to use:

• Configuring access to SharePoint
• Configuring access to Confluence

Configuring Access to SharePoint

These configurations control the authentication method used by the Confluence server and client browsers when requesting content from the SharePoint server.

• Access SharePoint using Basic Authentication and SSL (via Alternative Access URL)
• Access SharePoint using Integrated Windows Authentication (NTLM Only)

Selecting your Configuration for Access to SharePoint

Configuring Access to Confluence

These configurations control the authentication method used by the SharePoint server and client browsers when requesting content from the Confluence server.

• Access Confluence using Integrated Windows Authentication via IIS
• Access Confluence using Integrated Windows Authentication via Jespa
• Access Confluence using Standard Authentication
• Access Confluence using Standard Authentication with Microsoft SSO

Selecting your Configuration for Access to Confluence

Unsupported Configurations

Atlassian support does not cover the configurations listed below.

Atlassian Crowd

Crowd is Atlassian's single sign-on (SSO) and user management solution. For the initial release of the SharePoint Connector, we made a decision to delay full support for Crowd in favour of Microsoft's Single Sign-On Service (Microsoft SSOSrv). At the time, we felt that Microsoft SSOSrv's tight integration with SharePoint was a more compelling feature for SharePoint customers.

As the SharePoint Connector matures, we are now looking at expanding our support to reach a broader customer base. We hope to support Crowd for SSO in the future.

If you are interested in this feature, we encourage you to vote for the feature request in our JIRA issue tracker: CSI-588.

SiteMinder and other Single Sign-On Management Solutions

We have not tested any other single sign-on products, other than the Microsoft Single Sign-On Service (Microsoft SSOSrv) provided with MOSS 2007. If you are interested in this feature, we encourage you to vote for the relevant request if it already exists in our JIRA issue tracker, or create a new request. When voting or adding a request, please describe your environment.

• Request for SiteMinder integration: CSI-218

SharePoint Forms-Based Authentication

The SharePoint Connector cannot connect to SharePoint sites that use an ASP.NET Forms authentication provider. We may add support for this configuration in the future. If you are interested in this feature, we encourage you to vote for the feature request in our JIRA issue tracker: CSI-590.

Next Step

To continue with the installation of the SharePoint Connector, please configure the access to SharePoint.