Privately host product documentation for customers in a Confluence Space

Question

Hi,

We have a few different spaces in our Confluence cloud instance. Most of them are dedicated to individual teams (such as eng, product, support etc.) but one of them is dedicated to customer-facing documentation of our SaaS product offering.

Our product is accessible to customers behind a login for which we use Auth0 to enable SSO configurations with Okta/Azure/Gsuite/Duo. This allows our customers to not have a custom login account for our product but use what they have already setup in those authentication services. We want to see if we can expose a link to the Confluence space which has our product documentation from within our product once customers have logged into it. We do not want to make this documentation public due to competitive reasons so it has to be accessed only once customers have logged into the product. However we do not want customers to re-login to Confluence to now access this documentation. Ideally there is a secure login token that Confluence can work with to enable this protected access. This would also mean if the customer were to bookmark one of our documentation pages and came back later to look it up then they would have to relogin to our product and regen that token before they access that page.

The only documentation we are seeing points to 'Private' spaces where we would have to setup each of our customers as a user in the system which is not ideal (unless feasible via some sort of integration).

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appeciated!

Thanks!

unknown · Answer

Hi @Manu Anand,

It sounds like Scroll Viewport for Confluence by my team at K15t could be an amazing fit for you! Using it you can publish your Confluence spaces as a real documentation website that you can customize to fit your brand. You can also restrict your site and require your readers to log in through an identity provider that supports SAML (such as Auth0). This means your customers could be using the same accounts for your docs as for your product.

If you want to see a live example of a public help center you can check out the documentation on Scroll Viewport itself: https://help-cloud.k15t.com/

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Sven

Ste Wright · Answer

Hi @Manu Anand

To summarise your need...

* You have help documents in Confluence, for customers
* Customers should be able to access these documents from within your product (which is not an Atlassian product)
* You cannot make the Confluence Space/Pages public
* But, you also don't want the customer to have to login to Confluence each time, nor provide them with a user licence for Confluence

If yes, not natively.

You can make a Space accessible publicly, but it's available to everyone not logged in.

If not public, users need a Confluence user licence, and need to login to see the pages. You could use Atlassian Access so customers don't need separate login details, to minimise some of the impact?

Or, you could look to use an App from the Marketplace which might be able to offer similar functionality - for example, External Share for Confluence

Let us know if this summaries your need; if not, please clarify it for us :)

Ste