We have a Confluence knowledge base but we want to authorize specific articles for customers

[Ellie van Houten]

We have articles that have specific information for a customer. But we don't want that article to be accessible for other customers. 

We use the knowledge base and would love to be able to have those specific articles in the knowledge base too.. 

It's possible to authorize an article for groups, but you can't put customers in those groups. 

Is there any other possibility to be able to show specific articles to specific customers in the knowledgebase?

[Christos Markoulatos]

 Hey @Ellie van Houten 👋

Great question! I totally get why you’d want certain knowledge base articles to be visible only to specific customers. it’s a common need for personalized support.

Right now, Jira Service Management + Confluence doesn’t have a built-in way to set article-level permissions for individual customers or organizations. The permissions model works at the space level and uses Confluence groups, but portal-only customers can’t be added to those groups. So unfortunately, there’s no native feature for this yet.

Here are the most practical options:

• Separate spaces per customer
  Create a dedicated Confluence space for each customer and link it to their JSM project. Then restrict that space to your internal team and the customer’s Atlassian account. This is the most common workaround.

• Convert customers to Atlassian accounts
  If you can, give those customers Atlassian accounts and add them to Confluence groups. Then you can use page restrictions. This works well if you have an identity provider (IdP) with SCIM provisioning.

• Marketplace apps
  Tools like Refined for Jira Service Management or Scroll Viewport for Confluence can help customize the portal experience, but they don’t fully solve per-customer article permissions, they’re more about branding and navigation.

Links that might help:

• Set up a knowledge base for Jira Service Management
• Refined for Jira Service Management
• Scroll Viewport for Confluence

Hope this clears things up! 😊

[Ellie van Houten]

Thank you very much.  The first option seems to be the most obvious one. We now have 1 JSM project for all customers, but with this option, we would have to make spaces for all the customers, but also a JSM project per customer?  We have approximately 50 customers.  Or am I missing something? 

[Christos Markoulatos]

Hey @Ellie van Houten 

No you’re thinking about it the right way. If your customers are portal-only, you can’t restrict access per space because they don’t exist in Confluence. Permissions there only work for Atlassian accounts. So with the “separate spaces” approach, you have two choices:

• Keep one JSM project and link multiple spaces
  This works, but all portal-only customers will see any space that’s open to “Anyone with access to the service desk.” There’s no way to make one space visible to one customer and hidden from another in that setup.
• Create separate JSM projects and spaces for each customer
  This gives you true isolation without converting customers to Atlassian accounts, but it means managing 50 projects and 50 spaces. It’s heavy on admin work, but it’s the only way to keep things fully separate for portal-only users.

If you want granular control without creating 50 projects, the only option is to give customers Atlassian accounts and use Confluence groups for page restrictions. Otherwise, it’s all-or-nothing.

Hope this makes things clearer!