Planning your Environment with SP 2016 (v 1.9)

Owned by David Toussaint (Deactivated)
Last updated: Apr 02, 2019 by Dorrit Riemenschneider-Denecke
3 min read

This section provides guidelines on planning the infrastructure and configuration necessary to support your installation of the Confluence SharePoint Connector.

These instructions apply if you are using the connector with SharePoint 2016. If you have an earlier version, please refer to the  planning guide for SharePoint 2007 or  planning guide for SharePoint 2010.

On this page:

Prerequisites and Supported Platforms

Please ensure you read through and comply with the following requirements before installing the SharePoint Connector.

Windows

The Confluence SharePoint Connector supports the same Windows operating system requirements as those specified by Microsoft for SharePoint.

Confluence

You need Confluence 5.7 or later. You can download Confluence from the Confluence download centre.

.NET Framework required on Windows

Note that if you are running Confluence on a Windows Server, you should ensure that the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is installed. Microsoft .NET is required for Confluence in certain configurations (see the guide on Configuring Access to SharePoint with SP 2016 for more information).

You can download the .NET Framework 2.0 here (for the 32-bit version) or here (for the 64-bit version).

SharePoint

(info) These instructions apply if you are using the connector with SharePoint 2016. If you have an earlier version, please refer to the planning guide for SharePoint 2007 or  planning guide for SharePoint 2010.

Versions 1.8 and later of the SharePoint Connector support Microsoft SharePoint 2016. For a quick guide to the different SharePoint versions available, see our comparison of SharePoint versions and editions. Some features of the SharePoint Connector are only available when using SharePoint Server 2016, as described below.

  1. You will need SharePoint Foundation 2016 as a minimum requirement.
    • To check if SharePoint Foundation 2016 is installed, go to Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft SharePoint 2016 Products -> SharePoint 2016 Central Administration. If you can see 'SharePoint 2016 Central Administration', then SharePoint Foundation has already been installed.
  2. (Optional) For added functionality, you need Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 (Standard or Enterprise)
    • SharePoint Server 2016 is required for the following features:
      1. For the federated search feature. For more information, see our guide to configuring the SharePoint federated search .
      2. For Secure Store Service (single sign-on) functionality from SharePoint using Windows Integrated Authentication to Confluence. For more information, see the Microsoft product information.
    • For the Confluence SharePoint Connector, it makes no difference whether you have SharePoint Server 2016 Standard or SharePoint Server 2016 Enterprise edition.


We recommend separate server machines for Confluence and SharePoint

Due to the substantial memory and CPU requirements of SharePoint, we recommend that you run Confluence and SharePoint on separate machines. For evaluation purposes, it is OK to run them both on the same machine.

Supported Configurations for Server to Server Communication

For the Confluence SharePoint Connector to work properly, both instances (Confluence and SharePoint) need to be able to call each other via HTTP. This means that you have to make sure that none of the following components block HTTP communication between those servers:

  • (HTTP) proxies
  • firewalls
  • authentication implementations on Confluence or SharePoint


This section describes supported configurations for authentication implementations which are known to work. The important point here is that the SharePoint Connector implements it's own authentication. This means, your configuration only needs to ensure that Confluence/SharePoint are able to get past the implemented authentication mechanism on the other instance. Depending on the authentication mechanism, there are several solutions possible, e.g.:

  1. the instances are configured to authenticate via the authentication mechanism
  2. the instances bypass the authentication mechanism


So next, please decide which of the supported configurations is best suited to your environment.

Configuring Access to SharePoint

These configurations control the authentication method used by the Confluence server and client browsers when requesting content from the SharePoint server.

Selecting your Configuration for Access to SharePoint

Configuring Access to Confluence

These configurations control the authentication method used by the SharePoint server and client browsers when requesting content from the Confluence server.

Selecting your Configuration for Access to Confluence

Unsupported Configurations

Atlassian support does not cover the configurations listed below.

Atlassian Crowd

Not supported:

 

Crowd is Atlassian's single sign-on (SSO) and user management solution. For the initial release of the SharePoint Connector, we made a decision to delay full support for Crowd in favor of Microsoft's Single Sign-On Service (Microsoft SSOSrv). At the time, we felt that Microsoft SSOSrv's tight integration with SharePoint was a more compelling feature for SharePoint customers.

As the SharePoint Connector matures, we are now looking at expanding our support to reach a broader customer base. We hope to support Crowd for SSO in the future.

If you are interested in this feature, we encourage you to vote for the feature request in our JIRA issue tracker: CSI-588.

SiteMinder and other Single Sign-On Management Solutions

We have tested the connector with the following single sign-on solutions from Microsoft:

  • Single Sign-On Service, provided with MOSS 2007.
  • Secure Store Service provided with SharePoint Server 2010 (available with version 1.2 and later of the SharePoint Connector).

We have not tested any other single sign-on products. If you are interested in support for other SSO solutions, we encourage you to vote for the relevant request if it already exists in our JIRA issue tracker or create a new request. When voting or adding a request, please describe your environment.

  • Request for SiteMinder integration: CSI-218

SharePoint Forms-Based Authentication

The SharePoint Connector cannot connect to SharePoint sites that use an ASP.NET Forms authentication provider. We may add support for this configuration in the future. If you are interested in this feature, we encourage you to vote for the feature request in our JIRA issue tracker: CSI-590.

Next Step

To continue with the installation of the SharePoint Connector, please configure the access to SharePoint.