Suggestions on plugins/addons for ADFS SSO with cloud jira/confluence?

[Ruth Norton]

I know that Crowd only supports SAML for Google Apps, but I read that the connector for Google Apps itself is a plugin so Crowd's functionality was extended to support it.  Has anyone done it for ADFS?

Does anyone have any recommendations for a plugin that we could use, that would allow us to use ADFS SSO with our cloud instance of Jira/Confluence?

Thank you.

[Bruno Vincent]

Hello @Ruth Norton,

The Google Apps connector that is shipped with Crowd won't be of any help here as it allows Crowd to act as an Identity Provider ('IdP') for G Suite applications (which are the Service Providers or 'SPs'). In other words, when you want to access your G Suite applications, you're redirected to Crowd's login page and enter your Crowd username and password (instead of your Google username and password). As far as I understand your needs, you want to be redirected from Jira/Confluence to ADFS for authentication, which means that Jira/Confluence are the SPs and ADFS is the IdP.

If you use Jira/Confluence Cloud (hosted by Atlassian), you should follow the instructions on this page (Please note that as of today, Atlassian Cloud doesn't officially support ADFS and recommends using Azure AD instead): https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/saml-single-sign-on-943953302.html

If you host Jira/Confluence yourself on your own Cloud servers (e.g. AWS), then you can actually install a SAML plugin that will redirect your users to ADFS for authentication. There are many SAML add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace, either commercial or free: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=saml

There is also another option than SAML. If you're using Crowd, you can actually connect your Jira/Confluence instances to Office 365 / Azure AD as if it were a standard LDAP directory thanks to the ODCC plugin: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.cleito.odcc/server/overview

If your organization is actually running Office 365, you might be interested in that option. The main advantage of this scenario over SAML solutions is that your user directories in Jira and Confluence will always be synchronized with your Azure AD. For instance, let's suppose that you add a user to a group in ADFS, Jira/Confluence will not know about it until the user actually tries to login. With ODCC, your Jira and Confluence instances are connected to Azure AD via Crowd so they don't need a user's interaction to take changes into account. This is especially useful when you disable a user as he will immediately be seen as inactive by Jira/Confluence and will not count against your Atlassian licenses.

(Disclaimer: I work for the vendor of the ODCC plugin)

Hope this helps!

Bruno

[Jacob Andersson]

The original question her was about Cloud and I am also asking about Cloud as we want to run our infrastructure there. Are there any plans to offer the ODCC plugin for Cloud?

[Bruno Vincent]

Hello @Jacob Andersson

No, still no plans for that I'm afraid. The integration mode for Cloud is completely different and there is no API we can use for such an integration as of today.