Is there a way to restrict articles in a space for customers without them having an account set up?

[Heana Rusinski]

I have created a space for customers to view some documentation but I'm unable to see any options to restrict their visibility to certain articles only. 

My goal is to open a space for clients to see documentation but only documentation we set them permissions to view. 

[Kristian Klima]

Hello @Heana Rusinski and welcome.

It is possible and there are multiple ways to make it happen, depending on the number of pages and your requirement to make them structured.

Solution 1 - Public links

You can make any page from a non-public space ... public. What it means is creating a public link for a specific page that you want to share. Everyone with access to that link will be able to see that content.

The obvious downside is that it's always one page at a time so there's no structure.

Solution 2 - Anonymous access + page restrictions

Open up the space for anonymous access (anyone on the internet will be able to visit) but restrict pages that you want to keep private. 

Downside - it will expose you Confluence space and its elements and you'll have to manage restrictions for individual pages.

Solution 3 - Highly recommended - create a dedicated documentation website with only the pages that you want to share.

This is the solution that I deployed and it involves using a selection of content management apps (Scroll Viewport, Scroll Documents and Variants for Scroll Documents by K15t).

Basically, in your non-public Confluence space, you label the pages that you want to make public - with Confluence labels. Then you set up Viewport to build the public website - on your own domain - just from the pages with the said label.

Your Confluence space will remain fully anonymous - no public access. Viewport just builds a public website from your Confluence content that you define via simple labels. 

In my approach, my Confluence has about 900 pages, but only 750 are labeled for the public Viewport site.

Disclaimer: I don't work for K15t but the site I've built was featured in their customer success story)

[Heana Rusinski]

Hi @Kristian Klima

Thanks! That's really helpful. Do you have any experience with using any of these solutions when hosting all documents in one place but restricting documents to different audiences with a private space? 

E.g

Customer 1 needs to see documents A, B and C

Customer 2 needs to see documents A, E and F

We don't want customer 1 to see the documents E and F

Both customers should be able to come to the same space but only see the documents for them.

Is this possible? I'm unable to find an option for this.
 

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Heana Rusinski 

So we're using the following setup.

One Confluence space - most content is labelled public, some content is labelled private.

Public content ends up at doc.emplifi.io (Viewport site). Public AND private content ends up on our internal Viewport site... which is protected by our SSO. 

This means that you can have multiple Viewport sites, each built from the content you designated using a combination of labels to create multiple variants of your content.

In this case, you would act as your customers' SSO provider - this is more the matter of your SSO tooling, but it should be doable.

(you can still have public a Viewport site that features anything you're comfortable sharing publicly).