Does Atlassian have any plans to make read-only access free again?

[Joerg Rehberg]

Hi,

after EOL confluence DC we must migrate (500user licence, 5000+ employees) to cloud
For our company it is not acceptable to make existing confluence content public in confluence cloud.
The confluence site must limited to our 5000+ employees.

Also we can't configure IP Restriction List for confluence app, because most of our employee working in homeoffice vpns where split tunneling for the atlassian cloud domains are not possible. (btw the ip-list of atlassian cloud domains often changed..)
The investment for a 5000 user read-only license is not economical for us.

Ten years ago the read permission was free.
Is there a plan by atlassian go back and make read permission free again ?

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg 

You could use the guests feature in Confluence, for each paid user you can use 5 guests.

So for 500 user you could have 2500 guests, these are free of charge.

invite-guests-for-external-collaboration 

[Koloman Pfeffer]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg 

as others have already mentioned, you could add the employees as guests, but since for each paid license you get 5 free guests, you would still need 834 full licenses to add everyone else as a guest.

But be aware that you can only add guests to one single space for free. As soon as you enable a guest for a second space, you would also have to pay for a license.
So for this to work you would need to put all the necessary info in a single space (or segment the employees and the info they need very well) and also restrict who can add guests, which means that guest management will be an additional admin task.

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg ,

As far as I know, there are no plans for anything like that in the foreseeable future.

But, you could maybe explore things like Confluence guests, public links (check some examples here > you would need to use links to other pages so users can 'switch'), or maybe some Marketplace apps.

There's one more workaround you could try, and that is having JSM (you can use the free version) and having all of your employees as portal customers. Then just connect knowledge bases/spaces to the portal where your employees have access and they should be able to view pages, whether via Help Center or via Confluence. But again, this is not really an 'official' solution...

Cheers,
Tobi