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Case Study Appfire

Appfire
Headquarters
Burlington, MA USA
Industry
Web application development and integration
Reasons for Crowd implementation
Single sign-on solution, identity management
Crowd integrations
Confluence, Forums, Salesforce.com, Tangosol.com and custom apps
Customisations
Automated password reminder

Conversation with Randall Ward, CTO, and Mat Gauvin, COO, at Appfire Technologies, Inc.

Appfire Technologies, Inc. specialises in enterprise web-application development, integration services and the creation of custom application "plugins." Appfire's creative software solutions include a recent single sign-on integration project for Tangosol Inc., for which they chose Atlassian Crowd. Truly experts in integration, Appfire also connected Crowd with Salesforce.com.

You were hired by Tangosol to do some integration services work. Can you tell us a little about the Tangosol project and its goals?

Prior to their recent acquisition by Oracle, we worked with Tangosol in support of a number of key corporate web-based initiatives. Phase One centered on a complete re-branding of the Tangosol.com website interface, including a number of creative new product illustrations. Phase Two was then focused on two major goals: 1) the introduction of a more formalised and streamlined sales capture process, and 2) providing a better overall online experience for new and existing website users. This second goal was accomplished by leveraging Atlassian's Crowd to provide smooth single sign-on (SSO) throughout the following utilities:

  • Registration within the Tangosol.com website
  • A newly customised administrative toolset for the website
  • An existing Salesforce.com account
  • An existing Confluence wiki instance, and
  • An existing Jive Forums instance

Why choose Crowd?

When we began the project, our initial thought was to design and develop our own customised single sign-on solution from scratch. While developing our project plan, however, we learned that Tangosol had begun discussions with Atlassian about potentially leveraging Atlassian's new SSO product, Crowd. Atlassian software came highly recommended by Tangosol, but more importantly, Crowd was ideal as it met all of the core SSO requirements for the project. Right away we started conversations with Atlassian about Crowd's API infrastructure and how we could integrate the product into our custom solution.

"Let's put it this way — we will never write our own custom login methods again to support single sign-on authentication. Crowd is so sophisticated and flexible; it's where the standard should be." Randall Ward, Appfire Technologies
 

Had you used other commercial single sign-on solutions beforehand?

No, we typically bring our own SSO solutions to the table. We've been in the custom application space for the past 6½ years and we've always developed our own authentication, or "single sign-on." For previous single sign-on projects, we commonly used open LDAP implementations that we would then integrate via existing methods.

What's the real challenge when it comes to integration issues?

Traditionally, the inherent problem with all of these integration projects is having multiple data stores — there are multiple repositories for similar user information. Using Crowd on the Tangosol.com project, we were able to keep a single system of records. The beauty there was that Crowd is very extensible. With each identity in Crowd, you can store as many attributes as you'd like. So if I wanted to store 'Mat Gauvin' within the Crowd system, we could also store information like company name or his personalised usage settings. Managing all of the attributes for four or five applications within a single system definitely contributed to our success with the Tangosol project.

Describe the process of integrating Crowd into your software.

We have many years of experience with software integration, so we don't require an awful lot of documentation to get started. For the most part, we really just needed to be pointed towards the APIs. We then let our engineers flush things out, discussing integration questions directly with the engineers at Atlassian. In terms of the standards that we used and implemented, the process itself was smooth. Crowd has a very solid architecture. All-in-all, it was a straightforward implementation.

When all was said and done, we had integrated Crowd with Atlassian's Confluence wiki, Jive Forums, and two custom web-based software components that we drafted for Tangosol.com. This was accomplished by establishing custom application connectors and using Crowd for identity management.

Also, we are really proud to mention that we integrated Crowd with Salesforce.com during the Tangosol project. As part of this effort, we introduced a bridge between Salesforce.com and our custom solution thanks to their "AppExchange" APIs and Crowd. This was accomplished by drafting a small custom "connector" in Java which enabled communication between the utilities where it was needed.

"The inherent problem with all of these integration projects is having multiple data stores — there are multiple repositories for similar user information. Using Crowd . . . we were able to keep a single system of records." Mat Gauvin, Appfire Technologies
 

Did you customise Crowd at all?

Yes. After implementing the new Tangosol.com user interface, users were now able to log in and retrieve special information and product downloads. As such, we introduced a new web registration process with an automated password reminder feature. This password reminder was not an inherent feature of the Crowd solution. To achieve this we tailored our own application to work with Crowd, which was not very difficult. We also implemented a pretty robust back-end administration toolset on the web layer which was independent of the Crowd administrator. This custom solution worked in tandem with Crowd though, and it allowed website administrators to view granular user data as well as ongoing website usage data within the same admin UI.

NOTE: Since installing Crowd for Tangosol, Appfire has gone on to become an Atlassian partner and reseller!