Crowd supports an unlimited number of user directories. A directory can be one of the following types:

  • Internal to Crowd.
  • Connected to Crowd via an LDAP connector (e.g. for Active Directory), with all authentication and user/group management in LDAP.
  • A Crowd internal directory for user/group management but with authentication delegated to LDAP (e.g. Active Directory).
  • Connected via a custom directory connector (e.g. for a legacy database).

Once you have defined a directory in Crowd, you can map it to applications. Crowd will then pass authentication and authorisation requests to the directory, for all applications that are mapped to that directory. Modification of directory entities (users and groups) can be done via the Crowd Administration Console or via the application, depending on the application's capabilities.

You can even map multiple directories to an application, providing the application with a single view of multiple directories in a specified order.