Direct Access to Confluence when used as a Knowledge Base

Question

Hi,

We would like to have our end users directly sign in to Confluence during first sign in rather than having to log into JSM to get authorized for Confluence.  Has anyone been able to achieve this?

Ideal workflow:

* New Employee starts and IT sends an onboarding page through Confluence
* New employee logs into Confluence directly to view page.

Current workflow:

* New Employee starts and IT sends an onboarding page through Confluence
* New Employee MUST login to JSM first before Confluence access is granted
* New employee logs into Confluence to view page.

The current workflow is clunky and requires an unnecessary step for users to complete.  Has anyone been able to solve this?

Cosmo Denger · Answer

That's an interesting idea, although I don't think it will work for us because we support multiple locations and travelling employees.  I appreciate the idea though!

And yes, everyone having a Confluence license is currently too costly.

Robert DaSilva_a432as · Answer

That tracks, I would assume viewing the JSM portal as a customer plants a cookie in the user's browser, which Confluence then uses for verification they can view the content in the Knowledge Base space.

The only other "workaround" would be to grant user licenses to all users, but if you're not actively using Confluence outside of this one project / space, then that can get costly pretty quickly.

One other thought, although this would require a Premium tier subscription, is both whitelisting internal IP addresses for access to Jira and Confluence, and then making the Confluence space Anonymously accessible. This would likely bypass the JSM requirement and let anyone on the internet view the space, but the IP restriction would limit that back down to internal only.

Here's Atlassian's documentation on this feature: https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/specify-ip-addresses-for-product-access/

Cosmo Denger · Answer

We did review all the project settings with support, and they found nothing wrong. I just double checked the project settings, and the new test user is also a Customer there.

It feels like this behavior is Atlassian's way of verifying the user is indeed a customer first before granting access to Confluence.  It's just so clunky because the user is presented with a "Join Confluence" button when they first sign in which prompts a license request to admins.

You are right, I think this just needs a Confluence role added of "Customer" which grants JSM portal only customers access to Confluence.