Does Atlassian have any plans to make read-only access free again?

[Joerg Rehberg]

Hi,

after EOL confluence DC we must migrate (500user licence, 5000+ employees) to cloud
For our company it is not acceptable to make existing confluence content public in confluence cloud.
The confluence site must limited to our 5000+ employees.

Also we can't configure IP Restriction List for confluence app, because most of our employee working in homeoffice vpns where split tunneling for the atlassian cloud domains are not possible. (btw the ip-list of atlassian cloud domains often changed..)
The investment for a 5000 user read-only license is not economical for us.

Ten years ago the read permission was free.
Is there a plan by atlassian go back and make read permission free again ?

[Marc - Devoteam · Accepted solution]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg 

You could use the guests feature in Confluence, for each paid user you can use 5 guests.

So for 500 user you could have 2500 guests, these are free of charge.

invite-guests-for-external-collaboration 

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg 

Why not use IP restrictions via Atlassian.

Only allow confluence access from within the company network, if people need to connect via VPN first, set IP allow-list for the internal network only.

https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/specify-ip-addresses-for-product-access/ 

[Joerg Rehberg]

Thanks Marc, 

1) guest accounts could be a solution but our factor between editors and reader is 1:10. 1:5 is to expensive too.

2) And we can't configure IP Restiction List because most of our employees working in homeoffice. And the used VPN can't used for split tunneling, The VPN traffic for the atlassian domains can only configured  via IP-List (split tunnel) and we have too much firewalls in whole europe :( 

[Koloman Pfeffer · Accepted solution]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg 

as others have already mentioned, you could add the employees as guests, but since for each paid license you get 5 free guests, you would still need 834 full licenses to add everyone else as a guest.

But be aware that you can only add guests to one single space for free. As soon as you enable a guest for a second space, you would also have to pay for a license.
So for this to work you would need to put all the necessary info in a single space (or segment the employees and the info they need very well) and also restrict who can add guests, which means that guest management will be an additional admin task.

[Joerg Rehberg]

Thanks Koloman,

i didn't know that

and yes we plan to use more than one space, there fore this a secondv argument not to use guest accounts. First argument the price 500-editors with 5000-readers 

[Tomislav Tobijas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Joerg Rehberg ,

As far as I know, there are no plans for anything like that in the foreseeable future.

But, you could maybe explore things like Confluence guests, public links (check some examples here > you would need to use links to other pages so users can 'switch'), or maybe some Marketplace apps.

There's one more workaround you could try, and that is having JSM (you can use the free version) and having all of your employees as portal customers. Then just connect knowledge bases/spaces to the portal where your employees have access and they should be able to view pages, whether via Help Center or via Confluence. But again, this is not really an 'official' solution...

Cheers,
Tobi

[Joerg Rehberg]

Thanks Tomislav, 

i have thought about the embedded JiraSM  Application link to confluence too. 

I have the idea

- to use for our employees in a office-location -> a  IP Restriction list in the organisation 
- for our homeoffice employees (VPN) wich act as editor -> a DC Jumphost 
- for our homeoffice employees (VPN) wich act as reader -> the jira-coce application link. But in this case is the question: If a reader, who is not in the IP Restriction list of the office locations, has acccess to the link confluence page in jira ?

At the moment i can't test it

see 

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-questions/ip-restriction-list-vs-direct-application-link/qaq-p/3124772?utm_source=dm&utm_medium=unpaid-social&utm_campaign=P:online*O:community*I:social_share* 

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Joerg Rehberg What we do in my company, where many people only need to view pages, is use a 3rd-party app to generate a website with the content of the space (looks like an online help system) and then host that on our internal SharePoint that requires the user to be in our company to view.

In our case, we use Scroll Viewport from K15t, where you can generate output from multiple spaces to host in the same or multiple websites, but I believe there are other apps available. Check out the Atlassian Marketplace.

[Shannon Meehan _K15t_]

Hi Barbara, thanks for the mention of our app, Scroll Viewport! 

@Joerg Rehberg I’m with K15t, the team behind Scroll Viewport, which has now evolved into Scroll Sites.

Scroll Sites lets you publish Confluence content as secure, branded websites, which can be hosted internally or made accessible only to specific audiences – perfect for cases like yours where you need read-only access for a large number of employees without requiring full Confluence licenses.

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out Scroll Sites on the Atlassian Marketplace or reach out to us anytime at help@k15t.com — we’d be happy to help explore what setup would work best for your team.

Cheers, 

Shannon (K15t)