Using confluence as a customer portal

Mitch Balsam

When we were in our product development cycle, we decided to host all of our customer documentation in Confluence.. We decided to create a single account called "customer" and then give that to all of our customers so they can access our documentation..

Problem is we now want to control that process a bit.. So were faced with buying a confluence license for each customer (ouch!!) or moving everything to a different type of wiki...

Have others faced a similar dilemma?? what choice did you make??

CharlesH1

Possible approach: second instance of confluence to act as customer portal. Configured so that people directory is disabled, status updates turned off, as would personal spaces. Keep customer content separated in different spaces, with appropriate permissions set. I'm assuming here you want to enforce customer confidentiality. First instance is still your master version. Publish pages to the customer portal as required with the aid of ad-hoc workflows and the remote publishing plugin (Comalatech). This approach has advantages from a security perspective too. The customer instance can be in a dmz while the internal one remains behind the firewall.