Confluence behind firewall open to customers ?

[JIRA Autobot]

Hi,

We have deployed confluence internally behind our firewall but we have requirements from departments to create spaces where customers or 3rd party people can document and talk on products. What are the best practices for doing something like this ?

I see following options :

1. Open up the internal server to external people but use permissions on the spaces, here we risk that internal people forget to set correct permissions and the content get's out to everybody.

2. Deploy another instance only for external people.

What do you do in your organization ?

/donnib

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

It's possible to have your existing shared externally, but as you mentioned it's important that there is strong access control performed by the admins. I would give the default confluence-users group the baseline rights that you would use for external users, and create extra groups for your company staff.

One thing to remember is that you'll have to use the same Confluence base url to be accessible for both internal and external customers.

[JIRA Autobot]

yes but is that a good practice or better with a second instance ? The issue is also, how secure is confluence ? If we have a second instance there is no problem because it's behind firewall but if there are security issues in confluence then we have problems.

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

It's good practice if you want to share and edit content between your staff and external users. However, if the external users will only use content that do not affect your staff, it might be best (and most safe) to set up a separate instance.