Decrease the Confluence/Crowd Synchronization time
Asked by William Wells:

By default Confluence will automatically synchronize with Crowd every 60 minutes. I would like to decrease this time to about every 15 minutes, but the documentation states this can be done on a screen I can't seem to find the edit option for (You can change the synchronisation interval on the directory configuration screen). I am running Confluence 4.1.7 and Crowd 2.4.1. The Confluence User Directory screen only shows Synchronise as an option...there's no disable, test, or edit option. Is there another method to update this data?


Answers:
author: Septa Cahyadiputra
body: Hi there,

First and foremost, apologies for the confusion. The issue on your end is because you accessed Confluence using an administrative users that belong to the directory that you want to edit which is "Crowd directory". As mentioned on our documentation [here](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Configuring+User+Directories#ConfiguringUserDirectories-UpdatingDirectories) a directory could only be edited by an administratice user that belong to another directory. In your case, administrative user that belong to "Internal Directory" or the newly created "Crowd Directory".

This precaution is designed to prevent administrators from locking themselves out of the application by changing the directory configuration in a way that prevents them logging in or removes their administration permissions.

Hope the above information clarify your doubts on this issue.

Cheers,  
Septa Cahyadiputra

comments: author: William Wells
body: I understand the reasoning for it and noticed that JIRA actually does the same thing, but it warns you about what you're trying to do and stops the process. Something like that might be a good idea for all of the Atlassian tools. Just a simple warning to let you know you're about to do something bad. When JIRA did it to me, my first instinct was to synch the new Test Crowd User directory and then it allowed me to modify the original. Thanks for the follow-up.


author: Septa Cahyadiputra
body: Hi there,

Totally agree with you, I did some further research to find if there are any improvement request in regards to this issue to avoid any confusion in the future. I have found the following requests logs on our system:

* [JRA-27689](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-27689)
* [CONF-24312](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-24312)

We highly recommend you to add yourself as a watcher so that you would be updated, vote on it to increase its popularity and please feel free to address your concern directly into it. As I believe this would be a good addition for Confluence I have personally add my vote into it to raise the popularity of the issue.

For more information about how Atlassian implement New Features, please see the [Implementation of New Features Policy](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+Policy).

Cheers,  
Septa Cahyadiputra


author: William Wells
body: I was able to figure this out, but the documentation should be updated to reflect this. I created a new User Directory called Test Crowd and moved it up to the top level in priority. I then was able to see the Edit option. I changed the settings for the interval and the Read/Write ability. I then moved the original Crowd Directory to the top priority, disabled my Test Crowd directory and performed a test by moving a user in and out of a group. For testing purposes I had the interval set to 1 minute and sure enough it updated within one minute and my test JIRA also reflected this new change. Make sure you set the interval times to a higher time than one when you put it back to being the production user directory