Can i enable internal users from AD to read Confluence articles without using a license?

[JH]

I have some users (licensed) who should work with Confluence and many users (without a license) who should only read. However, no anonymous access to the Confluence pages should be granted. How do I have to set the authorizations for this?

Best regards,
Joerg.

[Davin Studer · Accepted solution]

If you do not have anonymous access then users are required to have a license to view the content. You could fake it a bit by creating a shared read-only account and give everyone that account to view the content. However, that may become a but of a nightmare to manage when people leave the company as you would probably have to change the password regularly.

Another option I saw someone do was that they created their own login form that authenticated against their own directory (in this case Active Directory). Once the login was successful it would make the decision to log the user in with their own account (if a license had been granted) by replaying the un/pw combination to the built-in login form or log them in with the generic read-only account by submitting the read-only un/pw to the built-in login form. This allowed them to keep the read-only account information secret.

[Joshua Sneed Contegix]

Hi Jörg,

You don't, the two parts of this ask conflict in a manner that does not allow those users to access those pages. The two parts being:

• Users to remain unlicensed, forcing them to rely on anonymous access
• Not allowing anonymous access, forcing those users to be licensed.

Cheers!