Confluence/IDOL/Active Directory Security Connector

Equion Consulting Confluence/IDOL/Active Directory Security Connector John McGuire 19th April 2011

Background International law firm 1 Confidential documents and information 2 Employees search for and only have access to content which they have authorisation 3 A great deal of documentation and information not available due to access restrictions 4

Systems Integrated Active Directory – Enterprise Wide Authentication Autonomy (IDOL) – Enterprise Search Engine Confluence – Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Content to be searched by IDOL
Confluence pages
Attachments – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, RTF, etc.
Blogs/News articles
Emails
Personal spaces
Comments, etc.

Security Issues IDOL search restricted to “public”, non confidential information and documents within Confluence Restricted content in Confluence was not indexed by IDOL and therefore not available through enterprise search

Access Control
Confluence – Has a hierarchical permissions structure i.e. people only see the documents and information which they have access rights.
Autonomy (IDOL) – Has no concept of hierarchy, each document is independent, needing an ACL (Access Control List) comprising the effective permissions.

Technical Challenges Develop solution initially for Confluence 2.7.2 and then 3.x Resolve the issues which existed within Active Directory implementation To take the hierarchical permissions structure from Confluence and apply it to each specific item indexed in IDOL Ensure high performance

Technical Challenges
Very complex integration – (Atlassian, Autonomy & Microsoft)
Technically challenging to implement – high levels of product expertise and software engineering skills required
Confluence 2.7.2 not supported
Active Directory presented a number of interesting challenges in the way that it was implemented
Migration from Development to Production environments
Performance was an important issue:
Indexing a lot of content
Each time there is a search – User and Group lookups in Active Directory
Not been done before (As far as we could discover)

Custom Confluence Plug-in Maintains the correct access rights Sends content to be indexed by IDOL in real-time i.e. whenever content is created, edited or deleted Extracts all indexable content within Confluence Delivers high performance

Business Benefits Authorised content available – All authorised content can be searched and made available. Correct access rights are maintained. An individual only able to see the content which they are authorised to see. Business productivity – Greatly improved productivity. Able to find documents and information quickly using enterprise search. Real time - New content indexed in real time. Available immediately with the correct access rights Automated process – No manual intervention, unless a full re-index of content is required to be carried out.

What we did
Specified the strategy
Developed and Tested solution in Equion environment
Migrated solution to client development environment and worked closely with the client’s technical team
Given the vagaries of the systems, we had to work through a whole series of issues to achieve success on a clustered environment

Current status
Plug-in product
Works with:
Confluence 2.7.2 – 3.x
Autonomy IDOL 7
Active Directory or LDAP
Can be rolled out in a few days

Greenhopper – Project management The project tools employed: Jira – Project and issue tracking Bamboo – Continuous integration Fisheye – Code changes Crucible – Code review Can strongly recommend the Atlassian project toolset Project Integration Tools Clover – Testing

Further Information? Contact John McGuire 020 7288 4312 [email_address] www.equionconsulting.com

Confluence/IDOL/Active Directory Security Connector

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Confluence/IDOL/Active Directory Security Connector Presentation Transcript