TechTime has been an Atlassian Expert partner since 2009. We provide full spectre of services related to Atlassian products from licensing to custom development, training, business implementations, upgrade call-outs and support & maintenance managed services.
The route that took us to the Expert status however was by being an add-on vendor. Among 20 of our add-ons currently available on Marketplace we consider EasySSO to be our flagship family of add-ons.
The previous incarnation of the add-on known as NTLM Authenticator has supported JIRA and Confluence since late 2008. We’ve debuted EasySSO for JIRA and EasySSO for Confluence on Atlassian Marketplace for Atlassian Summit 2014 and been busy since then improving and optimising the code as well as migrating our historical customers to Marketplace licenses using grandfathered prices.
For 2015 we’ve set ourselves an ambitious goal - extend our EasySSO product line to all major Atlassian applications.
Among our customers there are many who run the full stack of Atlassian software to fully enable their development teams. While JIRA provides issue tracking and project management with Agile cherry on top and Service Desk on call, Confluence serves as documentation repository, project information radiator, knowledgebase and sometimes as intranet, document management and document generation engine, Bamboo and Stash (now Bitbucket Server) are at the heart of their continuous delivery while Fisheye/Crucible pair serve those who need to manage remote repositories or are not quite ready for the brave new world of git.
Having tasted the nirvana of true Single Sign-On, where “from your workstation to your application no passwords asked” is a reality with JIRA and Confluence these customers have been asking us to extend EasySSO to these other products. In November 2015, just in time for Atlassian Summit 2015 — we delivered.
While on this journey we’ve done the necessary internal changes to support JIRA 7 in all of its 3 variants.
However, just extending the product line to all other Atlassian products didn’t seem to be quite “enough” for TechTime crew. We included a plethora of new features including logging via Log4j, User-Agent based filtering, localisation into French, German, Russian and Japanese.
And then the “one more thing” moment happened — midway through the year, well into our Summit 2015 preparations it was decided that we are ready to unveil support for Kerberos protocol within EasySSO.
An inconspicuous checkbox “enable Kerberos authentication” is all that gives it away in versions 2.2.x. For JIRA we have since backported this functionality to JIRA 6.x branch in release 1.0.36.
Not only this makes EasySSO the only single sign-on add-on on the market that supports both authentication protocols within Windows domain environment, this also allows our clients to extend the full Single Sign-On capability to domain-joined non-Windows clients — those on Mac OS X and Linux platforms. NLTMv2 authentication has been available on these platforms for a while, but alas none of the browsers would perform the authentication transparently without displaying an ugly domain authentication popup.
Though you can filter out all Mac and Linux clients using User-Agent filtering, now you can do better — by giving them the same transparent auto-login experience as Windows users.
Adding Kerberos to EasySSO serves multiple goals. It makes architects happy. It makes performance better in the environments locked in using Internet Explorer as Kerberos is significantly less chatty on the network. It allows us to take our competitors heads on. It opens up our roadmap for support of multiple unrelated domains authentication as well as the crazy idea of adding other SSO protocols to the neutral EasySSO umbrella brand (where there is 2 - there is place for more).
Watch this space!