Confluence Guests to use for Intranet

[Gleb Shchegolev]

Hi everyone,

we are cutting our budget, we had all people with license for Confluence, most of them never used it enough - so we took out some of the access. 
As we had Intranet made in Confluence, we want to keep access for all employees, even they do not have Confluence access. We can have 5 guests for every licensed user, does it make sense with such case? Is that doable with such setup?

Most users anyway just need read access. We want to save and do not move to other solution. 

Thanks

[Ste Wright · Accepted solution]

Hi @Gleb Shchegolev 

It might be possible (depending on the number of guests vs paid users) - but it's not the main use of the feature.

See this help page: 

Important policy information
You may not convert current or former paid users to guests. The purpose behind the guest feature is to invite users outside of your organization.

Atlassian reserves the right to restrict your access to the feature if you’re not using it in compliance with this purpose and the guidelines outlined in Atlassian documentation. Atlassian also reserves the right to change the ratio of guests to paid users.

^ Atlassian have designed the feature to allow for external users to access your instance - and if your users have been paid users before, you won't be able to convert them to Guests.

You'll also find Guests are for a single Space, not the entire instance.

Ste

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

If converting previously licensed users to Guests is not feasible (see @Ste Wright 's response), and the users need only View access to the information you might consider an app like this one:

Instant Websites for Confluence

This is just one third party app that provides a method for "sharing" your Confluence information without have to grant the recipients licenses to Confluence itself. Here's another:

External Share for Confluence 

Note that I have not actually used either of those apps, and am not offering a recommendation for them. I am simply making you aware of other options for sharing your content.

You can also look at the Share Public Link option.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/share-content-externally-with-public-links/

[Kristian Klima]

@Gleb Shchegolev 

You can use K15t's Scroll Viewport - https://help.k15t.com/scroll-viewport/ - for this very purpose.

Viewport creates a website (documentation portal, intranet) from one or multiple spaces OUTSIDE of Confluence - but you can put it on your domain and, crucially, you can set up your own SSO access.

Say you have 500 people in your org, all of whom are using SSO to sign into your tools. But only 100 people need to access Confluence.

Install the Viewport app on your Confluence, create a portal from your intranet Confluence spaces, put it behind SSO and bang, all your staff with SSO access can now access your Viewport-based intranet site without Confluence account.

Your spaces remain private, only your staff can access.