Custom Domain Sharing

Aug 11

For a long time now the Atlassian Community has been waiting for a feature that allows for the creation of custom domains in Confluence and Jira. For report owners, it can be difficult to offer continuity of service when you'll be redirecting users to a different website that's not your company's to share your data and documentation. On the part of the customers or users, it can be disorienting to visit two different websites to view reports.

You probably already heard about CLOUD-6999, a famous Jira ticket containing a request for custom domains for all Atlassian Cloud products. For example, if your company is Aces, you'll be able to host the Atlassian products under aces.atlassian.net. As for the score of the custom domains, the request is to allow users to host the Atlassian cloud products on the second-level domain. In the case of Aces, it should be jira.aces.com or aces.com/confluence.

The CLOUD-6999 Jira ticket was created in 2011 and it has garnered the most number of votes for Atlassian backlog issues ever. To date, it has more than 6,500 votes and over 2,000 people watching this issue. The latest update from the Atlassian team is that they have just built a team that will focus on delivering custom domains, and engineering work has just kicked off. After more than 10 years now, Atlassian still has many excuses as to why they can't deliver. The latest update from them is that they are going to deliver it in 2023.

The CLOUD-6999 ticket has been around for so long that many users became tired of waiting. It has also become a popular meme and has stirred up a range of merchandise such as CLOUD-6999 t-shirts, stickers, magnets, greetings cards, and more. Many viewed it as an epic fail in cloud history.

While waiting for the CLOUD-69999 to become a reality, Old Street offers an ultimate workaround for this dilemma with the introduction of the External Share for Confluence and External Share for Jira. Using these apps, you can share live Confluence page links and Jira issues to people outside of your organization or instance, without the need to purchase additional licenses.

External Share for Confluence

External Share for Confluence is a useful app for sharing your documents with people outside of your organization without purchasing additional licenses, which is not possible in native Confluence.

With External Share for Confluence, you can enjoy the following benefits:

Allows for creation of Atlassian links from your website. By default, the external links for sharing reside under this domain: confluence.external-share.com. To customize it so that it will appear like they come from your website, simply replace "external-share.com" with "nameofyourcompany.com." Making this change is easy and will just take a few seconds of your time.
Allows external users to view and add attachments or comments on your Confluence pages. Users can collaborate in real-time, making it easier to update the progress of what you are working on.
Allows for a secure way of sharing as it lets you generate unique links that are password-protected, with time limits and customizable permissions. Pages are read-only, and with granular permissions, you can dictate what your users can see.
External users don't need a license or Atlassian account to collaborate. Using a single link, you can share one space or one page with or without the child pages. This means that you could share a large amount of data, a knowledge base, or a product roadmap under your company's domain. Each link is customizable into something more relevant for your business, allowing your users to easily recognize that it's coming from you.
This app is available on Server, Cloud and Data Center.

External Share for Jira

The External Share for Jira works just like the External Share for Confluence. Both of these apps allow you to collaborate with external users without having to pay extra for additional licenses or accounts.

You can use External Share for Jira to securely share Jira issues, boards or filters with users outside of your company with no Confluence licenses. It's a useful app especially if you frequently work with external users to complete a Jira ticket.

With External Share for Jira, you can enjoy the following benefits:

More visibility of issues for external users. With native Jira, teams that work with external members have to use different platforms to use on the same issue, and this creates delays, information loss and error. When using External Share for Jira, it removes any barrier among teams that don't have access to Jira or Atlassian accounts.
Internal users stay in control of Jira. With this app, you can let external users view, comment on and add attachments to a Jira issue, but not edit them. You could enable the feature that allows external users to change the issue status of a ticket by a simple drag and drop. There are also other granular permissions available to dictate what external users can see. This means that while you can see an entire board, you could also choose to just share an issue's sub-task if needed.
This app allows you to share a good-looking board containing all issues through one link without sacrificing security. You could select security options for the link such as adding password protection and expiration date. Each link comes with a 16-character code that is impossible to guess so your security won't be compromised.

Why you can forget about CLOUD-6999

Custom domains and links are available to all types of shares in External Share. Both External Share for Confluence and External Share for Jira makes it possible to work with external users without an Atlassian account and without sacrificing the security of your organization. The best thing about External share is that you don't have to pay extra to set up your custom domains as this feature is native to External Share.