How can I set up the Confluence KB permissions protected but read-only without using licenses?

Question

I want to use JIRA Service Desk with a Confluence KB.

In https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskserver036/serving-customers-with-a-knowledge-base-921471856.html it says that the "Users who don't have a Confluence licence can't create content, but you can give them permission to view your knowledge base content for free."

This is exactly what I need - but I am not sure how to do it correctly.

I know that:

* Customers can look-up content from the KB via the Service Desk Help Center (Customer Portal). However, they can just search for it, they do not have actual access to the Confluence Space
* Customers can get writing license (which costs for each customer) to access the Confluence KB space and even edit / comment (if they have the permission).

What do I want?

I simply want that customers can...

* use the Service Desk Help Center / Customer Portal to handle their issues + search for KB entries
* navigate through the Confluence KB (click through the space + search) and have read-only access. However, ideally the KB is NOT public

Any suggestions on how to do that?

Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ · Answer

@Markus Raab

I requested directly from the Product Manager of Service Desk who I met at Summit as well as some of his colleagues whom I know well.   Unfortunately no response as of yet.  I think a lot of the problem is that this has to cross over two products Jira and Confluence to figure out how to make this happen.

I told them quite frankly that Service Desk comes in very low on the KB scale when you look at Zendesk and Service Cloud (Salesforce) that all have these full scale (free to customers) KB built in.

Markus Raab · Answer

I requested information directly from Atlassian about this as it is obviously not possible or not clear at all. I have read that other customers have the same issue.

Meanwhile anyone else suggestions on that?

Markus Raab · Answer

There are still problems ... I just do not get it running and I am not sure if it is even meant to be.

I would like that a "JIRA Service Desk Server" customer can access the entire KB space.

Accessing the help center and previewing KB articles out of Confluence works already.

The problem is that the customer should be able to access read-only the Confluence Space that implies the Knowledge Base linked to JIRA Service Desk.

The Confluence Space must not be public, thus login is absolutely required for that.

For Cloud this seems to be definitely possible if converting the user accounts to Atlassian accounts, c.f., https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/manage-jira-service-desk-customer-accounts-913213935.html

However, my challenge is to make it running on JIRA SD + Confluence Server.

Anything on that?