Linking Jira Service Desk to a Confluence Knowledge Base with different user bases

Andrew Culver

The Guide to link Knowledge Base to JIRA Service Desk for unlicensed user says

JIRA Service Desk has introduced a new feature starting JIRA ServiceDesk v3.1 where there is no need for users to have a license in Confluence to be able to access the Confluence Knowledge Base through Service Desk.

However the instructions then say 2 paragraphs later

This feature was originally built for the Cloud environment which has a shared user base directory. If you are running server versions of JIRA Service Desk & Confluence, you will need to make sure that your user base for both applications is the same

 

Our Jira instance gets users from our LDAP directory with Copy-on-first-login enabled.

Our Confluence instances gets users from AD (I believe, based on groups).

While the usernames are the same for any given user, there will be some users in Jira who are not in Confluence, and some users in Confluence who are not in Jira.

 

The guide then explains that if the Jira Service Desk user is not in Confluence, then it must be manually created.

 

Could we not just allow anonymous Public Access to Confluence and make our KB space accessible to anonymous users? https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/setting-up-public-access-156.html

 

Would this allow Service Desk customers to access our KB through Jira Service Desk? Or does that KB linking in Service Desk require that the SD customer also be a user in Confluence?

 

 

Kian Stack Mumo Systems

If you have no content you want to keep secure in that knowledge base, opening up Confluence to anonymous users would work. 

It's important to keep in mind that the system first needs to be opened to anonymous users at a global level. Make sure you lock down any spaces you don't want anonymous users to have read access to.