Can we use Confluence as the help engine for a third-party product?

[Harlo Lenning]

We would like to be able to use Confluence as the help engine for a third-party, Java-based product we are developing; however, we have some authentication issues that we must solve before we can do so. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find anything in either the Confluence documentation or online that has been able to help us. Here is some background and a brief description of our issues:

1. Our product has its own internally-based authentication mechanism.
2. We want our users to only be able to access Confluence when they are logged into our site. 
3. We want access to help to be seamless. We do not want to require that our users also log into Confluence to see the help.  
4. The help links should not be accessible using any other mechanism. Sharing topics using email/chat should not work unless a user is logged into our application.
5. Long-term, we may want to open up portions or all of the help to the general public, but that is not a requirement as of yet.

If any of you have created or implemented an authentication solution that could help us solve these problems, we would appreciate hearing from you.

[Shannon S]

Hi Harlo,

The way to do this would be to integrate it with Jira Service Desk.

• Set up a knowledge base for self-service

You can then give each of your users a customer account, which does not require a license. You can lock down access from anonymous users, to Customers only, so the general public wouldn't be able to access the pages.

Have a review through the above article and do let us know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Shannon