Customer Portal users can't access Confluence

[J.R. Murray]

Hello,

We have multiple customers with a JIRA Service Desk project and a linked Confluence space for each.  They used to be able to access Confluence (as unlicensed users) from a link we had setup from the Customer Portal, but they now receive Access Denied messages.  When did this change?  How can we get this access without turning on anonymous access?

All of the settings are setup per this article, and have been for over a year:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/serving-customers-with-a-knowledge-base-732528995.html

[thais]

Hi, J. R.,

This changed about a year ago.

As you can check on a message from the Jira Service Desk Team on March, 15/2017 on the bug report JSDCLOUD-4901 - Portal users cannot access the knowledge base:

"As part of making authentication and single sign-on easier across Atlassian products we have consolidated product access through Atlassian account (https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/atlassian-account-for-users-873871199.html). This means that access to our products outside the customer portal requires an Atlassian account.

Customers can still search for KB articles, view articles, bookmark articles and so on using the customer portal. This does not require an Atlassian account as it's done through the customer portal.

If you need your customers to directly access Confluence to browse through KB articles, you can either:

1. Make your space anonymous-accessible. This will mean that anyone will be able to browse your KB articles without needing to log in. If you are experiencing issues as described in CONF-30161 then please make sure you have linked your space to a JIRA Service Desk project via Project Settings → Knowledge Base as this fixes the problem.

2. If you do not want to make your space anonymous accessible, ie. you want customers to explicitly log in before they can see Confluence, then you must convert your customer user accounts to Atlassian accounts. You can convert them yourself using the instructions on https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/select-the-right-account-for-your-jira-service-desk-customers-873871210.html or you can file a support ticket and our support can bulk migrate your customer accounts to Atlassian accounts. Having an Atlassian account does not consume a license."

Best regards,
Thais