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Comment by leftcoaster | Hacker News Reader

Crowd never should have happened.

For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead.

I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves.

And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder

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Crowd's LDAP code will hit JIRA trunk the day after 4.2 branches for release. So, good LDAP is coming for both JIRA and Confluence.

Yes, it's years later than it should have, but we are finally getting our house in order on that front.

In the next month or so, we'll also be starting to work on a better installation/upgrade experience for JIRA and Confluence. Would you be interested in chatting about what drives you nuts in the upgrade process? I want to make sure we sort out as many of the problems as possible. doflynn@atlassian.com if you have the time.

I can't speak for leftcoaster, but what drives me crazy about the upgrade process is this: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA041/Upgrading+JI...

I'm just upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1, I shouldn't need to create a new installation, a whole new database, re-download, install, and configure every plugin I use, disable e-mail access, etc...

I want to be able to run an upgrade script, or drop in a new war and when it starts up it asks if I want to upgrade things. Or an inline upgrade. Look at Wordpress, Gallery, MS Office, any OS, etc... for examples.

My startup uses Crowd, Jira, and Confluence. However, due to the complexity and risk (we've had issues crop up in the past) of upgrading, we tend to run several versions behind, waiting until there's some "must have" new feature or improvement.

And while we do use Crowd (and while I generally really like Atlassian products) the Crowd LDAP support is really lacking, and the complexity of hooking Jira/Confluence into Crowd is a pain (no write support for Fedora 389?). It should be a simple flag, maybe even changable from the admin. Not a bunch of hacking in .properties, .xml, and libs.

Upgrade points noted.

JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5 will make it much easier to connect to Crowd. No editing of files required.

We don't have write support for the Posix schema scheduled for Crowd, I'm afraid, so no promises on that front.

I think the only reason we're using Crowd now is to map LDAP groups into Jira.

We've had Crowd deployed for two years to handle web app auth. Configuration, deployment were a bit painful.

We're pulling it out and writing our own - seems to be the only way to get necessary features such as delegated administration which have been on the Crowd roadmap for years now.

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