Crowd 4.2 Release Notes
October 2020
The Atlassian Crowd team is proud to bring you Crowd 4.2 which comes with some great new features and improvements.
Interested in trying this shiny new version of Crowd? Don't forget to renew your active software maintenance.
If you're upgrading from an earlier version, make sure to read the Crowd upgrade notes.
Passwords to external systems now encrypted
For improved security, all passwords for external systems which have been so far kept in the Crowd database in plain text will be encrypted starting from Crowd 4.2. If you're an upgrading user, password encryptions will happen during upgrade.
Here's the list of the sensitive data that is encrypted:
LDAP directory passwords
Remote Crowd directory application passwords
Azure AD web application keys
SMTP mail passwords
Proxy passwords
For more details on password encryption in Crowd, see Password encryption.
New attribute mapping when importing users via CSV
To avoid unnecessary license consumption, Crowd 4.2 allows you to flag users as active or inactive on import using the CSV files. When you import users with the CSV file, you can select one of three statuses users will be in after the import:
- active
- inactive
- the same as in the CSV file
Look and feel
Starting from version 4.2, Crowd allows you to customize the look and feel of the login screen. You can customize the page with your own logo, custom welcome text, and selected coloring. This way you can make your Crowd instance stand out, brand your Crowd instance with your company's colors or just turn everything pink because you just feel like it. To learn how to make changes to the login screen, see Look and feel.
Improvements to directory details and audit log screens
Crowd 4.2 brings you refurbished directory details and audit log screens so that you can have a quick access to what the status of your latest synchronization is. If any synchronization error should occur, we'd like to give you better understanding of its cause. What we did:
- In the directory view we've added:
- extended information on your last synch status,
- node ID and node name (available in Crowd Data Center only).
- In the audit log, we've added:
- incremental and full synch information,
- node information (available in Crowd DC only),
- information on how much time a synchronization has taken,
- clear graphical indicators of a successful/ failed build.
Performance improvements
Crowd 4.2 brings improved performance for full synchronization from Crowd to an application. Fetching membership is around 10 times faster now, which on average decreases the full sync time by half.