Knowledge Base accessible to customers

[Jose Litre]

As the Training Manager for a Software Company, I was tasked with relocating our User Guide from its former online platform to Jira Knowledge Base. While I am nearing completion of the content migration, there remains the need to verify how customers can access this material.

Upon review, it became apparent that Jira offers two levels of access: making a space public with anonymous access, allowing anyone on the internet to search and retrieve the content (including our competition), or restricting access to Jira users, necessitating individual set up for each customer within Jira in order to grant access to our Knowledge Base.

I understand that Jira Knowledge Base is primarily designed as an internal sharing solution. There is also an option for sharing a 'public' link with specific pages when customers require access to single pages containing technical information. Has anyone found a viable workaround for this scenario? As I understand that Jira KB (or Confluence) is not intended for external content sharing, I am considering seeking another solution such as Zendesk which is purpose-built for this requirement. The primary reason being my preference for Jira's editing tools when creating and publishing content.

Your input and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

[Nicolas Grossi · Accepted solution]

@Jose Litre Welcome! You might want to take a look at this add on:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211636/scroll-viewport-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

HTH

Nicolas

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Jose Litre 

I'm a Viewport user and I approve @Nicolas Grossi 's message :) 

• Viewport allows you to keep you Confluence space anonymous while making the Content available for public viewing.
• You can customize the look and feel of a Viewport site.
• There's support for Google Analytics and you can put a JSM widget on the site.
• You gain an extra workflow option - publish a Viewport site when all your content is ready.
• Your own domain.
• You can combine Viewport with Scroll Documents and Variants for even more content options (versioning, conditional content, etc.)

[Jose Litre]

Thank you Nicolas and Kristian for your responses and feedback. I will give a try using the 30 days trial to see how it works. My main objective is to restrict the access to our KB to customers only. I could see there is a token option that I will need to explore with our team.

Thanks again.

[Kristian Klima]

@Jose Litre 

Technically speaking, an SSO option should work too - depending on how your SSO is set up in your SSO provider's environment.

Think along the lines of... you have your company's SSO account which you use to sign into all tools that your company is using, including your Atlassian org. But your company SSO is also the Atlassian account that you use to sign in to the community, open support tickets with Atlassian and Marketplace vendors... You need an SSO expert for that but it's worth exploring.

[Anna Mitina _Stiltsoft_]

Hi @Jose Litre 

Welcome to the community!

Accessibility is taken very seriously at Atlassian. However, if you're open to discovering the option of using the 3rd party apps I'm willing to share with you a workaround that would enable you to share your KB with the customers.

We have an add-on called IZI for Confluence - LMS, Training Courses, Quizzes and although it's an LMS, it can help you to solve the case. 

Namely, we have a feature that allows you to enroll external users (people, that are not part of your company's Confluence) to the courses. External participants don't have access to any other information except the one that is provided within a course. This means that you could create a course consisting of existing Confluence pages which serve as KB for customers and enroll your customers to that course. They would receive an email with the link and would be able to access the information at any time.

Hope that helps and feel free to ask me any questions :)

[Jose Litre]

Thank you for reaching out Anna. I will keep this in mind. We're currently configuring and testing Scroll ViewPort. I will reach out to you if need it.