Read only access that requires authentication?

[Brandon Kofer]

Hello,

We are looking to use a Confluence space as a company intranet and I am not sure about licensing requirements. Is there an option that would require a user to have to authenticate to the space and not require a license? The large majority of users will only require the ability to read information on the site. No need to edit, comment, etc.

Any information is greatly appreciated.

[Hamza Chundrigar]

Hi @Brandon Kofer 

Welcome to the community.

At the moment, any person who will need to log into your Confluence to consume information in your instance will need a licensed seat. It doesn’t make sense to enable anonymous access for your site/space/page since its meant to be a company intranet.

This means that, at least natively, you cannot specifically offer 'view only' access to unlicensed internal users within your organization.

If you’re willing, there is a workaround that will still cost you much less than if you were to license everyone who needs read-only access to the content.

You could use an app like Scroll Viewport for Confluence that allows you to publish your Confluence documentation as an internal/external help center where you are then able to restrict your published content (in that help center) only to those sets of users that will need to read/view the content by setting up Authenticated Access.

This way you would still be able to keep costs down, comparatively speaking.

Best regards,

Hamza

[Bill Bailey]

The scenario you described is much more aligned to server/data center. With your own server, you can have it behind a firewall, so that only those users with access to the internal network (say via VPN) can access the server. Then you could set pages to anon view.

Now all your users are authenticated on your network, and can see view-only content without consuming a license,

With the Cloud, you would have to use an approach similar to what @Hamza Chundrigar is suggesting, but then that again that has a cost of extra work and plugins.