Using confluence as a customer portal

[Mitch Balsam]

When we were in our product development cycle, we decided to host all of our customer documentation in Confluence.. We decided to create a single account called "customer" and then give that to all of our customers so they can access our documentation..

Problem is we now want to control that process a bit.. So were faced with buying a confluence license for each customer (ouch!!) or moving everything to a different type of wiki...

Have others faced a similar dilemma?? what choice did you make??

[rmorales8303]

Hey.. is there any advice on this issue? I'm looking for some thing like this too.

[Manuel Antonio Lombardi]

Hello, this post is from 2015, do I still need to buy separate licenses for my customers to read the wiki? no way, thanks

[Ernest Koe]

I think there is a scenario here that has been completely missed. I agree with the OP, it's cost prohibitive to give every customer user a login but frequently that is exactly what we need to do make projects and issues visible to different clients from time to time. We almost need a class of "external party" concurrent-use logins; i am even happy to pay for them so that we can make accounts for customers that dont need to be in all the time.

[Septa Cahyadiputra]

If you want to avoid buying a license for each user when they can only read the content of Confluence (no write), you might want to enable anonymous access to your Confluence.

This would ensure that you don't need to buy another license as anonymous users is not counted as a licensed user.

Hope it helps.

Cheers,
Septa Cahyadiputra

[CharlesH]

Possible approach: second instance of confluence to act as customer portal. Configured so that people directory is disabled, status updates turned off, as would personal spaces. Keep customer content separated in different spaces, with appropriate permissions set. I'm assuming here you want to enforce customer confidentiality. First instance is still your master version. Publish pages to the customer portal as required with the aid of ad-hoc workflows and the remote publishing plugin (Comalatech). This approach has advantages from a security perspective too. The customer instance can be in a dmz while the internal one remains behind the firewall.

[Mitch Balsam]

Thanks charles.

You are correct that we dont want customers to read each others data.

Still have the problem of buying a license for each user just to login.. But each user is only going to be a readonly user.

I think its more likley that we need to export of expose several documenation spaces into another system like drupal...