Confluence Cloud with SSO (Access) required but read-only (Anonymous?) access for unlicensed users?

Question

Can Confluence Cloud + Access be configured so that SSO is required, but with Anonymous Access to allow a larger subset of corp users to view a site, but not edit?Scenario: Company Intranet (old-school - managed by HR/Corp Comms/etc)

Only HR/Corp Comms/etc team would need read/write

Everybody else in company should be read-only

Goal: only pay for licenses for HR/Corp Comms/etc, not entire company.

Bonus: if we pay for Refined, etc, it’s a cheaper license because of less users.
I guess it's related or similar to this: * Anonymous Access with SAML 
* How can I configure SAML SSO 2.0 to allow anonymous access? 
* Can I have guest users without using a license in confluence

Maybe this is already addressed by CONFCLOUD-30161 ? Call this a pre-purchase question, as we are not currently running in the Cloud at this time.

On 14/Jul/2021 Giuliano C. commented:

From now on, unlicensed users can access anonymous content even if they don't have Confluence access and are authenticated to their accounts.

But does that mean anonymous content is publicly visible? We don't want that.

EDIT:

Ohhhh, this only works if your Confluence Space is shared as a KB on a JSD that all of your users are Customers. Bleh.

Remember that the site must have a space integrated with Jira Service management to allow unlicensed users to navigate in Confluence, according to the knowledge base permissions.

unknown · Answer

Hi @Darryl Lee

In case the solution you've mentioned in your comment above didn't fit your needs 100%, I wanted to mention my team's app, Scroll Viewport for Confluence Cloud.

In a similar way to Refined, Scroll Viewport takes your Confluence documentation and transforms it into a help center for your users to browse your content.

As well as being able to publish public help centers, just last week, we released restricted access sites that you can set up with SSO.

Once you pay per number of Confluence Cloud users on your instance, you can set up as many help center sites as you need and have an unlimited number of visitors to your sites, all at no extra cost.

You can then link from your help center to JSM so your users can raise support tickets.

You can find out more on our Marketplace listing →

Darryl Lee · Answer

Hrm, so I've spoken with somebody at a previous company where I could've sworn we tried to do this, but he confirmed it ended up not working.

In digging around though, I found this possible workaround, which would only work for us because we're still old-school and have a VPN. ("Zero trust? What's that?")

Cloud Only - Plans With IP Allowlisting

Allowing anonymous access on cloud exposes your content to all internet users. It is, however, possible to further restrict this through IP Allowlisting rules configured for your cloud site. This makes it possible to expose content only to users on a private network or VPN.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-read-only-access-and-licensing