Need advise on the best option to use Confluence documentation as Help Centre

[Madhuri Chanda]

We are trying to explore the best option to use for publishing our Confluence documentation to external customers.

1. we have looked at the features of "Scroll ViewPort" and "Refined" options, but looking for your advice to suggest which suits best for our requirement.

2. We have some product/application help documentation in Confluence to be exposed to our external customers, but who should be able to access this help content as a link access within another inhouse tool which they have access to, so that confluence license is not needed for the users to access the content.

3. Could you please suggest which plugin or option suits for our needs.

Thanks,

Madhuri

[Sven Schatter (K15t) · Accepted solution]

Hi @Madhuri Chanda,

Does your inhouse tool use an identity provider that supports SAML? If yes, you can configure Scroll Viewport to use SAML authentication from the same identity provider and your external customers will be able to log in with their existing accounts to access your documentation - no Confluence accounts needed.

If that doesn't work, you could also use token authentication, which essentially allows you to generate passwords for accessing the site. You can find documentation on both methods here.

As I'm with K15t, the makers of Scroll Viewport, I don't know so much about Refined, but looking at their documentation it seems like they only allow restricting access to paid Confluence users ("Private") or to customer accounts of Jira Service Desk ("Support").

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Sven

EDIT: I just realized that you didn't say whether you were using Confluence Cloud or Data Center. My answer is for Confluence Cloud. On Data Center, since you are in control of the infrastructure, you could set up your own mechanism that handles authentication.