The advantage of an external authority is that it provides a single place to manage user accounts across applications. JasperReports Server can thus use the same login information that you maintain for your other applications. When a user logs on, the server is given the username; then it maps the roles and organization. If these have changed from the previous logon, the server can synchronize the external user information stored locally.

However, external authentication does not actively replicate the contents of the external authority in JasperReports Server. If users are deleted from the external authority, or role definitions change, there is no mechanism to update JasperReports Server’s local information. The external user or role definitions remain in the server’s internal database, but authentication is still secure because they cannot be used to log in.

In general, the mapping and synchronization maintain the external users and roles in JasperReports Server, but administrators must handle new roles, and they may want to cleanup deleted users, as explained in the following sections.