Enabling external users access to Jira and Confluence without consuming a license

Owned by Mari Fuglem
Last updated: Feb 20, 2024

Our customer is a well-recognized university with 10 000 students and well-established education and research collaborations with more than 50 private enterprises and international universities across six continents. At any given time, there are 100-200 ongoing projects across faculties where university researchers and students use Confluence and Jira as enablers for collaborating with researchers from other universities and industry. Projects have various durations and contributors move in and out of projects frequently.

 

The challenge:

This posed a challenge for the system administrator at the university since the project information was sensitive and access needed to be restricted, which means that each external individual involved in a research project consumes one license. The system administration needed to find a way to allow external users to view content in Jira and Confluence without consuming additional licenses.

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The solution: SSO-verified Anonymous Access

Jira and Confluence offer Anonymous Access to view public content without having an authenticated session.

Kantega SSO Enterprise takes this to another level and provides the ability to require users to authenticate with an identity provider, using SSO, to access anonymous content. Read more: SSO-verified Anonymous Access. 

By enabling this feature in both Jira and Confluence, the university saved on license costs while maintaining secure access to all their content.

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Configure SSO-verified Anonymous Access in Kantega SSO Enterprise

  1. Edit Permissions in Jira/Confluence.

  2. Enable Force login in Kantega SSO Enterprise – SSO is applied to all URLs.

     

  3. Configure Known domains in Kantega SSO Enterprise.

  4. Enable SSO-Verified Anonymous Access in Kantega SSO Enterprise.