Confluence guest users have issues in following links to Teams

Question

In our Confluence space, our guest users (consultants from outside our organization) have issues in following links to documents on Teams, even if they are (guets) members in the Teams channel. They get an error that the link doesn't work for them as a guest.

I cannot seem to find which settings I should change to overcome this problem, any thoughts?

Kristian Klima_gtcuat · Answer

I don't know how you manage your users in Confluence, but obviously, your guests would not be included in any SSO setup you might run.

So it's safe to assume they log in with an email address and a password.

Generally speaking, links (and embedded content) do not work if the linked file/page is not public... unless both environments are governed by the same SSO setup. Which your guests would be, by definition, excluded from. In other words, the easy path only opens to user, who uses ONE method to access BOTH environments.

There might be a way by tweaking the settings for the specific docs on the Teams side (for example, Google docs allows you to Publish a document but restrict access to your org, I wrote an article on the subject). I don't what options are available in Teams but it's worth exploring it.

(I can think of a solution but it's so complex that it's just not worth the effort because it's in the 'if you can doesn't mean you should' category).

Liesbeth K. · Answer

@Kristian Klima they can access the documents when they go to Teams and open it there. So how should we solve this?

Kristian Klima_gtcuat · Answer

Hi @Liesbeth K_ and welcome to the Community.

It sounds like an authentication issue / conflict.

Can they access the linked document if they try to access it from outside of Confluence? In other words, when they try to access the docs NOT as Confluence guests.

This is, typically, not an issue if access to Confluence and a third party environment (MS, Google, etc.) is governed by one SAML SSO.