Jira and Confluence authentication and SSO

[Greg T]

We are in the process of spinning up a service desk, and looking to utilize Confluence as the knowledgebase (KB) add in.  Our current setup is JIRA is integrated with our Active Directory and also serves as our user repository for Confluence.  

When a user is entering an issue from the customer portal, it searches and presents results pulled from Confluence which works great, the problem that we are trying to solve is when a user clicks on one of these results it then prompts for credentials even though both are using the JIRA user repositofy.  What is the best way to prevent the user from having to authenticate into Confluence to view the KB info?

I know "Crowd" can offer a solution, I would prefer not to license and maintain another product just to meet this single need.  I feel I may be missing something with the Application links and the associated authentication configuration as a potential solution.

[GabrielleJ]

Yes, the "Application Links" is the way to go. I always wanted the "Trusted Application" links (which will not require any authentication prompt ever and that means these 2 applications fully trust each other) or you can use OAuth (which will require them to log-in one time). Using the former requires that JIRA and Confluence have the same set of users, if not you can only use OAuth.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/integrating-jira-and-confluence-2825.html

[Steven Behnke]

If you want Single-Sign On, the Atlassian solution is a single directory within Crowd and using the Crowd-Seraph SSO Plugin in each client application.