Atlassian Crowd Connects Active Directory, Web Applications

Atlassian Software Systems announced the general availability of Crowd, a single sign-on application for helping businesses manage authentication and authorisation for multiple web-based applications. Crowd enables IT administrators and application developers to integrate and deploy single sign-on using directories such as Microsoft Active Directory and Apple OS X Open Directory. As well as giving IT administrators a single consolidated point of user management, Crowd gives end-users the convenience of single sign-on across Atlassian JIRA, Confluence, or any other non-Atlassian, web-based applications in their business. Features include: simple to use administration console for managing users and their various security rights; support for custom user stores; support for unlimited users (with the Unlimited User license) and user stores; pre-built Java libraries; support for Microsoft Active Directory and Apple OS X Open Directory; database support including DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL; chained authentication and authorisation rules to support multiple directories views to a single application client; integrates with Atlassian's other products: JIRA (a professional issue tracker), Confluence (an enterprise wiki), and Atlassian's newest product, Bamboo (a continuous integration build server). Designed for use in any IT environment, Crowd runs on J2EE application servers and supports nearly all JDBC-compliant databases. In September 2006, Atlassian acquired Authentisoft, who had developed IDX, a single sign-on solution. Since that time, IDX was rebranded to its current name, Crowd, and new features have been added. Crowd is available to evaluate and purchase from the Atlassian website. Pricing for Crowd starts at US$600 per license. http://www.atlassian.com