Guests in Confluence

[Lena Sargsyan]

Hi dear Community,

We have teammates that are using Confluence only for reading purposes, they dont create or edit Spaces and Pages. That would be great to somehow decrease the billing amount for such kind of users.

Would it be possible to convert those user into the Guests. Or at least  new hires, who dont need full access and will just be reading the content in our Confluence,  register as Guests and not pay for them.

Thank you!

Lena

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Lena Sargsyan 

As per the documentation regarding Guest Users for Confluence, you cannot convert users who have a paid license to Guest users.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/invite-guests-for-external-collaboration/

Also note that a Guest user would have access to only one Space in Confluence, and you would have to individually add a Guest user to a space. Access to Spaces for Guest users cannot be managed by setting up user groups of Guests and granting access to Spaces based on the groups.

Note also on the above page that Atlassian has said the intent of the Guest user is to grant access to people who are external to your company.

To what extent do the users need access to Confluence? Do they need access to many pages across multiple spaces? Could the pages they need access to be condensed to a single Space?

How often are the pages updated?

You could look at the third party apps that are available for sharing Confluence content without having to grant a license. There are options for sharing individual pages, and for publishing entire spaces as static websites outside of Confluence. Here are just a few options.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Introducing-public-links-for-Confluence-External-sharing-made/ba-p/2485103

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1220562/external-share-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214121/instant-websites-for-confluence?tab=overview&hosting=cloud

[Rilwan Ahmed · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lena Sargsyan ,

You need to enable anonymous access to your site. Giving anonymous users access to your content lets you share content with people who don’t have licensed access to your Confluence site. This means you can let them view and collaborate on content, without having to add them to your license count.

Only drawback of this setting is, When you make your content available to anonymous users, this means anyone on the internet. The anonymous access feature can’t accommodate sharing with some anonymous people and not others. It’s all or nothing.

You can refer below link on ho to enable anonymous access

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/set-up-public-access/

[Peter Kerrigan]

You're also able to configure this anonymous access in a way that doesn't require opening up permissions to everyone on the internet: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/granting-unlicensed-internal-access-to-confluence-cloud-1209869865.html

The limitation of this method is that anyone with JSM portal access will also have access to Confluence. So, if you have external customers outside your organization, then they will be able to view the specified Confluence spaces and pages as well.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Lena Sargsyan Based on this question and answer posted yesterday (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-to-use-certain-Confluence-space-as-read-only-for-internal/qaq-p/2592786#M290566 ), my boss and I have decided that using Scroll Viewport by K15t achieves our goals and is much less expensive for the company than Confluence licenses for our people who only need to read the content.

You may want to check the Atlassian Marketplace for an app that will meet your needs.