security for confluence behind our web portal
Asked by ccahuber:

We currently have a customer facing portal, where customers login and then are able to access whatever resources they need. We want to use confluence to create a knowledge base for our customers. There are a few stipulations to this:

1. When a customer logs into our portal, they should be able to access the KB and search and read for help on our support page. It's fine if its just a link to the KB from within our portal.

2. We DO NOT want the KB to be accessible from outside our portal without the user authenticating within our portal first. Meaning, they should not be able to go to website.confluence.com and read our KB without authenticating. It's fine if they authenticate with an anonymous account, but this needs to happen within our portal and the user should not see any credentials.

3. Ideally, it would work like this:

-They login to website.ourportal.com.

- They go to our support page and click on the link to confluence.

- Confluence authenticates with the credentials they used to login to our portal.

- They are taken to confluence KB.

4. The users in our portal are assigned roles within our back end, is it possible to tie these in with the groups feature of confluence somehow?

5. If our customers are able to authenticate with confluence as a security measure, would this count towards license use? (They are not updating or changing the KB, simply authenticating to read the material).

Answers are much appreciated and would appreciate any other ideas or alternates to making this work.

Thank you!

Chris


Answers:
author: Brant Schroeder
body: Chris,

You would need to integrate confluence into your single sign-on solution. Are you using cloud or server?

If confluence is public then there is no licensing issue. If they are authenticating in then they would need a confluence license.

comments: author: ccahuber
body: Hi Brant,

thanks for the reply. We could use the cloud or server version, whichever works for us.

I'm assuming this would work with the server version, and it would be 1 license per authenticated user. Would this be 1 license per user who is currently logged in? As in, we need a license for each currently authenticated user? I would say we have about 100 users who use our portal concurrently, but in general we have about 1000 user accounts. Do we need to create these accounts in confluence first?

So if a user were to authenticate with their sign-on to our portal, I'm assuming we could also have it authenticate with confluence at the same time, and then they can access confluence on our help section.

Thank you!


author: Brant Schroeder
body: There are different vendors that offer single sign on solutions to cloud and server. Atlassian has Crowd for server and recently released identity manager for cloud but I have not used either. Confluence is a per user license and authenticated users. So you would need a 1000 users if that is the total number who will be logging in. We add our users dynamically through our identity management integration into confluence. We also apply the role confluence-user during the sync.


author: ccahuber
body: Thank you Brant. I will present this information to my manager and our developer.