Customers (employees from AD) can't see articles from Confluence

[Jose Q]

Hi there, 

We have 50 employees that I want to set up as customers on the JSD. As we are using Active Directory, I just set up the AD sync and am Synching to JIRA and Jira is linked with Confluence, so all the users show up on confluence as well. 

All our setup is on internal Servers, not on the cloud.

According to the documentation, I should be able to have the IT team and a few other users to manage the confluence pages and give all the users access via the JSD with one only login prompt, using AD credentials.

Currently, I'm able to login with a customer on the JSD, I can see my service desks I can search articles and raise issues, but I cannot open the article itself, it says I need to login on confluence to see the article. 

Although I've been looking online for a solution, I wasn't able to find any meaningful justification for this behaviour. The only thing that works as a workaround is configuring the confluence space as anonymous access, but that is not an option, I've just done that to see if it would work and it did. 

If anyone can help I would appreciate a lot. This product is nearly perfect for our purpose, but this is a bit of an unexpected problem when everything from the marketing to the manual says it shouldn't be required. 

Cheers, 

Jose

[Thomas Deiler · Accepted solution]

Dear @Jose Q,

I guess that this is an issue with the "common user base" of JSD and Confluence. Follow this link to set up the KB successfully.

So long

Thomas

[Jose Q]

 I haven't skipped any step in any of these guides, everything checks. 

I already had JIRA and confluence linked with the Application links before, I just added the JSD and then went on checking any further setup necessary, nothing is missing from that page. 

But I must confess, I haven't found any way to properly diagnose a missing configuration, but from where I see it comparing everything, all boxes are correctly checked, just not being able to give customers access to pages via JSD. 

I have Jira users, Confluence users, which are all the Jira users as well and customers, all the employees from the AD, being correctly synched. They can log in and search pages from Confluence, just not see its content...

[Jose Q]

The only dodgy statement that I'm not sure due to its ambiguity is this one. Does Application Links in JIRA classifies as "... something that passes login information..." between Jira and Confluence? As this is the only bit I'm assuming so...

[Thomas Deiler]

Dear @Jose Q,

are the customers login information also stored in AD? If you enable self-sign-in this will not happen due to the fact that in most cases AD access for Jira is read-only.

So long

Thomas

[Jose Q]

Hi @Thomas Deiler,

Do you mean self sign-up?

If so, no. As I said in the post, all customer are employees and come from AD. There is no sign up, and I can login fine as a customer.

My only issue is visualising the articles from confluence via JSD with a customer account.

thanks.

[Thomas Deiler]

But when you login to Confluence as a customer , you can see the article, right?

[Jose Q]

Hey @Thomas Deiler, 

Yes, that is right. With my customer account, I have access to it. I was actually not expecting that, I thought I had to really access that page via the JSD window. 

If I click on the login button it opens up a new window with confluence and if I log in again I have access to that page. 

Is that supposed to be the intended behaviour of JSD? 

[Thomas Deiler]

Yes - that's the design. If you want to skip that second login step, you need to implement SSO.

[Jose Q]

Ok, so that's something I wasn't expecting. 

I thought with all those application links and permission linking spaces would automatically make a seamless user experience to the user. 

That's something really hard to find in any documentation, that would be a good thing for Atlassian to improve, at least on the documentation and marketing, if you are selling something very user-friendly for clients but then you have 2 login screens in front of you, that's a hard one to sell. Just my opinion. 

I'll probably explore the SSO then, seems like there are good options out there. I'll try the SAML one maybe as it seems it can easily integrate with Azure. 

Thanks for your help @Thomas Deiler! That is the information I was looking for some time now, it's not clearly mentioned anywhere!

[Thomas Deiler]

I am glad that I could en light you. I say thanks in advance for accepting my answer.

Thomas D