"Knowledge for everyone, including your service desk customers" Can you give us a case example where this is useful?

[Deleted user]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Confluence 5.9.1-EAP05112015V2 Release Notes

I have trouble understanding exactly why this feature is being introduced. In what cases is this functionality useful? How does it exactly work?

I'll venture a guess - tell me if I'm wrong. If I wanted to make a space with public-facing documentation but wanted to keep all other content, including Confluence users, hidden from the users of this documentation, I could now do that?

Is the only significant change for the site visitor navigation? They cannot see the Dashboard etc... this Confluence space instead becomes more like a public website? It does not look nor behave like a wiki for anonymous users?

As far as I know, it has been possible before to make some spaces accessible anonymously while hiding all other content from view. Or does this somehow override the Confluence global "anonymous use" setting?

I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate more on this change. Thanks.

[Rachel Robins · Accepted solution]

Hi Jonas, 

This is a highly requested feature for our JIRA Service Desk customers.  You can read about the JIRA Service Desk side of the changes here JIRA Service Desk 3.1.0-OD-03.

It is aimed at JIRA Service Desk users who only use Confluence as a knowledge base, but can't make any of their content public (by allowing anonymous access). For example a small IT team providing tech support to all staff in a big organisation. 

The Confluence experience for these unlicensed users is very, very limited. Basically they can see pages in a KB space linked to a JIRA Service Desk project. They can't search, comment, like, or navigate in any of the usual ways, and the dashboard is not available, so it is quite unlike the experience you get when allowing anonymous users to access your site.    

For Confluence instances that are not connected to JIRA Service Desk, nothing changes. This feature can only be enabled via JIRA Service Desk. 

Hope that helps 

[Deleted user]

It certainly does! So it does look to me like you can build more of a custom stand-alone KB for non-Confluence users, but using Confluence to author it. Navigation happens only via links in the space itself instead of the usual search, pagetree and various other navigation methods in Confluence. Seems like a great idea!