In the hope of helping someone else who finds this post here is how I got XMPP clients authenticating but still unable to get it working for the administrator portal.
To get this working there are three parts.
A. Update the following properties at (Server > Server Manager > System Properties).
provider.admin.className = org.jivesoftware.openfire.crowd.CrowdAdminProvider
provider.auth.className = org.jivesoftware.openfire.crowd.CrowdAuthProvider
provider.group.className = org.jivesoftware.openfire.crowd.CrowdGroupProvider
provider.user.className = org.jivesoftware.openfire.crowd.CrowdUserProvider
crowd.groups.cache.ttl.seconds = 3600
crowd.users.cache.ttl.seconds = 3600
B. Update your crowd.properties manually in your openfire/conf directory. Add the following.
application.name=<Crowd Application Name>
application.password=<Crowd Application Password>
application.login.url=<Server URL:9091>
crowd.server.url=<Crowd Server URL>
session.isauthenticated=session.isauthenticated
session.tokenkey=session.tokenkey
session.validationinterval=0
session.lastvalidation=session.lastvalidation
#http.proxy.host=
#http.proxy.port=
#http.proxy.username=
#http.proxy.password=
http.max.connections=20
http.socket.timeout=20000
http.timeout=5000
#These fields are needed if Crowd server uses SSL Certificate
clearspace.certificate.verify = false
clearspace.certificate.verify.root = false
C. Add SSL Certificate if your Crowd Server uses SSL.
I found that adding the certificate to the standard keystore does not work as openfire will only check its own key stores.
openfire/resources/security/
From here I restarted the server and while the Administration console did not work logging into the XMPP server works for all my users.