View only Access to Confluence
Asked by Allison Beaudry:

Hi All,

Our company will be using Confluence to provide customers with view only access to our user manuals. However, we want to avoid having to grant them individual licenses in order to give them access. BTW, we don't want the page to be public and only want to grant access to certain customers. Also, we would prefer that the users not be anonymous.

Would this be possible by simply approving the user's email domain? Our customers are primarily companies with unique email domains.

Thanks,

A


Answers:
author: carlosughini
body: Hello Allison,

I hope you are having a great day!

Unfortunately, at the moment, it is not possible to have customers without licensing accessing a Confluence page that is not public. Basically, if they can log in, they need a license.

So the options here are the following:

* Allow anonymous access to spaces, then people will be able to read such spaces without logging in at all, so they won't need a license.
* Use public pages.

You can check more information about these options in the links below:

* [Confluence: Read-only access and licensing](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-read-only-access-and-licensing)
* [Setting Up Public Access](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/setting-up-public-access-156.html?_ga=2.171224871.64614333.1583107087-209045837.1579655252)
* [How to give non Confluence users access to a Space](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-give-non-confluence-users-access-to-a-space-779166002.html)

**Workaround**

One possible workaround for your situation that I checked in another post is to create an account that has read-only access and **did not tell the employee base the UN/PW of that account.**

After that, create another login form that would authenticate the users against the login system, and if it is correct, then submit the secret UN/PW for Confluence to the Confluence login page.

By doing this, the users won't know the secret account and don't need to worry about resetting the PW when people left the company. They won't be logged into Confluence as themselves, they will use your another account, but they still need to authenticate their account before getting in.

Unfortunately, it is not a simple workaround, but I think that is one option.

Please check all the information above and let me know if it helps.

Cheers,

Carlos

comments: author: Allison Beaudry
body: Ok, so if I go with your work-around dummy account option, how would I go about creating another login form to authenticate the users against the login system? I am having a bit of a hard time understanding exactly how this option would work.

Thanks for your help!


author: carlosughini
body: Hello Allison,

So, you would need to create a new login form, like a new application, to the user to fill their credentials to make login. Basically, they wouldn't login to confluence, but in your new application and then be redirected to Confluence, does it make sense?

It is not a simple solution, but it is one workaround that if you have time to create, might work for you.

Cheers,

Carlos


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud