Automatically grant all clients (registered on our platform) access to our Confluence knowledge base

Question

Dear community,

my company is currently considering using confluence as a self-service knowledge base for our customers. However, we don't want everyone to be able to access the information of our knowledge base as we don't want to disclose our functionalities publicly (to anyone not registered on our platform). Granting access rights to the knowledge base individually and manually would not be feasible for us, as we have thousands of users.

We would like to design it in a way that only registered users of our platform can enter the knowledge base. Ideally, after they logged in to our platform, they see links that direct them to the knowledge base.

Even though conducting extensive research, I could not figure out if there is the possibility to implement it that way. So I would be delighted to hear your feedback on this.

Thank you so much!

Kyla Kearns · Answer

Hi Shannon!

I am jumping in here as this directly relates to the issue I am experiencing.

The best scenario is that our clients are able to access one of our Confluence spaces to browse articles and video tutorials.   We only want this space to be available to users registered to our support portal (ie: not anonymous).

Having clients search for the articles in the portal is not enough as they will not be able to see all of the self-learning topics available (as they may not know what to search for).

Do we need to set up licenses for each of these clients to keep our Confluence space not anonymous?

I followed the Set up a knowledge base... article, but I can't seem to find whether the solution is possible.

Ideally, a client can click on a link in the Announcement part of the Support Portal, and arrive at the Confluence space with all of our articles there.  Is it possible to do this while still having the space not anonymous?

Thank you so much in advance.

Shannon S · Answer

Hello Lars,

Repi gave you great information, but I wanted to answer your question specifically for the Cloud platform, which I believe you are on.

All accounts on Confluence require a paid Confluence license. If you have a set of users in Confluence that you've registered, but you don't want them to have full access to all content in Confluence, you can grant them access to specific spaces using this method:

* How to Grant Access to One Space Only to a User in Confluence

Otherwise, you can just not give your users an account in Confluence, and they will be considered anonymous users (users who do not login to Confluence). Note that this is not possible in the Cloud Free Platform.

* Set Up Public Access

If you have Jira Service Desk in addition to Confluence, you can provide access to your Service Desk customers to Confluence for free. Have a look at the below article for more details:

* Set up a knowledge base so customers can serve themselves

If you use this method, just keep in mind that you can only allow them access to the Confluence Space you have linked to your Jira Service Desk project. They will also not be able to access any Confluence spaces that are set up for anonymous users, unless they are completely logged out or accessing via Incognito Window.

The reason for this is that when a user is logged-in, even with a Jira Service desk customer account, Confluence doesn't consider the user to be anonymous. There's a feature request to change this to allow them to be able to access anonymous spaces below:

* CONFCLOUD-30161 Allow unlicensed, authenticated users to have anonymous read only access

I hope that's clear, but let us know if you have any questions!

Shannon

repi · Answer

@Lars Opfermann

User rights control is only possible via the rights management of confluence.
However, user management can be carried out via the internal confluence user management as well as via an external user management via Croud, Active Directory, LDAP, etc.
However, a license in confluence is required for each personalized registration.
If more users have access to the confluence than there are licenses, then this is only possible with an anonymous user registration.
The anonymous user then has access to any content that is released for anonymous users.