External Users access to Knowledge Base
Asked by Jerome Schmaltz:

Hi,

We would like to give access to external Users to our Knowledge Base (KB), but would require them to be authenticated against our B2C identity provider (Auth0). We would like to give them access to certain parts of KB (e.g. only public tagged content).

In the other hand, for our internal employees, authenticated against Google, we would like them to have access to all resources of the KB.

Knowing we projecting to scale our solution and serving thousands of customers, creating Confluence accounts for every new external User does seem costly.

Is there a way we can segregate access, and support this kind of scenario?

Thanks


Answers:
author: Sven Schatter _K15t_
body: Hi [@Jerome Schmaltz](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4865176),

Welcome to the community!

It sounds like [Scroll Viewport for Confluence](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211636/scroll-viewport-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview&utm_source=atlassian-community), an app by my team at K15t, could be exactly what you need. It allows you to create sites and publish your Confluence content as real websites. Sites can be set up to require SAML authentication which should work well with Auth0. This does not require readers of your site to have a Confluence account - they merely need to authenticate against your identity provider .

The best way for you to go here could be to set up two authenticated sites: one for your internal employees and one for your external users. If you want to curate the content for these two different sites in the same Confluence space, you may also want to have a look at our other apps [Scroll Documents](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217608/scroll-documents-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview&utm_source=atlassian-community) and [Variants for Scroll Documents](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1226295/variants-for-scroll-documents?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview&utm_source=atlassian-community).

Using those, you could create an "internal" and a "public" variant. This means for example only pages having a "public" label will belong to the public variant, which you can then publish through Scroll Viewport. In fact, you can even manage which content should appear in what variant on a paragraph level, using the [Scroll Conditional Content macro](https://help-cloud.k15t.com/scroll-documents/Define-Conditional-Content.14048002093.html).

Hope this helps! If you have any questions let me know. :)

Cheers,  
Sven

comments: author: Jerome Schmaltz
body: Thanks for answering [@Sven Schatter _K15t_](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4546729) , I'll have a look at the tools/apps you're suggesting. That might resolve the licensing issue.

One question though, regarding Scrollview, how's the export is triggered? Is it a manual process? Can it be on new content, or content changed (e.g. event-based)?

Regards,

Jerome


author: Sven Schatter _K15t_
body: Hi [@Jerome Schmaltz](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4865176),

At the moment, Scroll Viewport requires you to manually start the updating process. It will generate a preview site for you on which you can see how the content from Confluence is presented in Viewport. If you like it, then you can go live with the press of another button. You can find more details in [our documentation about this topic](https://help-cloud.k15t.com/scroll-viewport/Publish-and-Update-a-Site.843515339.html).

We are currently also looking into how we can support other types of workflows, such as an event-based updating flow like you mentioned. But it will still take us some time to come up with a concrete solution there.

Cheers,  
Sven


author: Elizabeth Barr
body: Hi there!   

This sounds somewhat similar to what a previous company of mine did, albeit via Okta authentication and not Auth0: having the majority of the Confluence site (all spaces) accessible to employees through SSO and then only one customer-facing space. I was not involved in the implementation, but I believe this was achieved by Confluence treating each customer login as a single user. Sorry that I can't provide more help or specifics, but I did just want to say that it should be possible with the right technical know-how. Good luck!

comments: author: Jerome Schmaltz
body: Thanks [@Elizabeth Barr](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4738329) for sharing your experience.

My understanding is that you payed a license for each external Customer, in my case this would be expensive in the scenario where I would need to support thousands of customers, unless there is something I am missing...


author: Elizabeth Barr
body: I think in this particular case, every external customer was treated as a single (same) user, so it was considered just one license. But I'll let someone with a better understanding of what specifics you'd need for your situation offer guidance :)


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud