Jira + Crowd: Adding new users

One of the cool new things I learned at conference on was how to shorten the time required to add new users into Jira.  We have Jira hooked up to a Crowd SSO server in our office.  When we’d onboard a new group we’d have to go through the following steps:

1. Add new group to Crowd
2. Populate new group with users
3. Create new Jira project for the new group
4. Add the new group created in Crowd to one of the project roles
5. <FAIL> as the new group has not synced to Jira yet.
6. Wait and go to a long lunch (like a motorcycle ride to Alice’s)
7. Finish adding the new group to the new Jira project.

We’d asked the Atlassian team how we could do this in a programmatic way.  When asking how we could write a plugin to do this in the UI, the team let us know that feature was there.  Doh!  18 months of the go to lunch method was out the window.  Here is how to do so:

1. Go to the Administration menu in Jira
2. Click User Directories
3. Click synchronize for “Remote Crowd Directory”

And voila!  Two hours of wait time consolodated into 25 seconds.