Adding customer access to confluence.
Asked by Mateusz Starzycki:

Hello,

I work for a fairly small company (less then 20 people) we are using the JIRA and Confluence. We run into the following problem. We want to roll out the customer support page which will be knowledge base for our customers with well known bugs described. We want it to be nicely integrated with the rest of our system we thought that the Confluence is providing the features we want to. However being a small company with a lot of foreign users we don't really want to put every single foreign user to our system ( we don't want them to modify the data just browse the page).

We are not sure of what is the best way of doing it - should we create the exported page for our own logging system which would display everything for our user?

Is the only option buying the additional licenses for all the foreign users?

Can we purchase the support desk system that introduces the customers login which are not consuming the licenses and add them permission to browse the confluence page?

Should we create the "Guest" account and provide our own web page login which would redirect any outside customer for the guest account in the confluence.

Best Regards


Answers:
author: Brian
body: Hi Mateusz,

If you only want your customers to access your Confluence instance, then you'll have to create accounts for them with CAN-USE permission and possibly a specific group membership so that they'll only have access to specific content. This will count towards your license and incur the license fee. There isn't a way to identify anonymous users and only provide a subset of them with access.

Hope this helps!

comments: author: Mateusz Starzycki
body: Well, yes it helps in terms of it answers our question, but it is not ideal, as we would like to share our knowledge with customers and we really enjoy your products, but it seems like we need to address the issue by changing the technology of sharing the data with customers... Which is not ideal.


author: Jerry Wiltse
body: We just signed up for confluence, so I'm a bit surprised. So, to clarify, you're saying that Confluence cannot serve our knowledge base content to the public internet? Any visibility at all MUST be through a named and managed confluence user account?


author: TomC
body: Hi Jerry, Absolutely Confluence spaces you designate can be accessed via 'anonymous users' on the public internet. So, say you have 100 spaces (we have more than that as it builds over time), 1, 2 or all of them can be set up for anonymous access. It's your choice.

Atlassian itself uses Confluence to serve up its software documentation to the public, so again YES, Confluence can serve your knowledge base content to the public internet. What I'm gathering from the use case behind this question, it's specifically targeting selected customers viewing content - for that to happen, those selected customers need accounts.


author: Steven F Behnke
body: JIRA Service Desk customers count too. Atlassian has made it so that Service Desk Customers can see content from appropriate knowledgebase pages, at least in the Cloud so far.


author: Jan St?hle (Test User)
body: Can I charge users that I provide with access to a space - for using it (with or without possibility to contribute)?

If yes, is there a plugin who manages the "memberships" similar to "paidmemberships pro" for wordpress?


Tags: confluence-administration