Jira and Confluence Usage with Different Audiences

Justin Cimino

Hi Everyone,

We encountered an unforeseen obstacle that I'm curious if others have encountered and solved on the Cloud version of Jira/Confluence.

Goal

My goal was to use Confluence as a single source of product and company knowledge.

Facts

• Our company uses Jira and Confluence.
• Some clients (external users) need access to Jira projects and have explicit access to Jira.
• Staff (internal users) need access to Jira and Confluence and have explicit access to Jira/Confluence.
• Confluence has information for both clients (external users) and staff (internal users). As a result,
  • All staff have explicit Confluence access as indicated above
  • All clients have Confluence access via the anonymous permission setting to specific spaces

Issue

What we learned is that for clients (external users) who have explicit Jira (but not Confluence) access cannot view the Confluence pages set to anonymous access. To view anonymous Confluence pages the user would have to either logout of Jira, use a new browser, or use incognito mode within his/her current browser. 

Has anyone solved the issue where you grant users access to Jira explicitly but only access to anonymous pages of Confluence? 

Thank you.

Shannon S

Hi Justin,

I think you might be referring to this feature request below:

• CONFSERVER-30161 Allow unlicensed, authenticated users to have anonymous read only access

Below are the suggested solutions to use as a workaround:

Suggested Solution for non-Service Desk customers

We cannot allow authenticated but unlicensed users to edit anonymously accessible content, since that would mean that admins would only have to enable anonymous access to have the equivalent of an unlimited user license.
Instead, we should allow authenticated but unlicensed users to get read-only access to confluence content with anonymous permissions.

Such users will still be locked out from parts of the application that require a licensed user, including viewing user profiles, people directories, etc, unless anonymous has been granted permission to view user profiles.

Solution for JIRA Service Desk customers

Link JIRA Service Desk project to Confluence space to allow customers to have access to knowledge base in Project Settings -> Knowledge Base.

Please feel free to also join in on the conversation already happening on the request. There are a few suggestions as well as ways users propose to work around it.

Let me know if you have any questions about it.

Regards,

Shannon