Current State:

Currently, when a Confluence space is linked as a Knowledge Base to a Jira Service Management (JSM) project, any customer who has access to view the articles can also download any files attached to those articles. Similarly, in JSM requests, there is no granular control to allow viewing/previewing an attachment while preventing the user from downloading the actual file.

For organizations with strict security or compliance requirements, it is necessary to allow customers to read information (Knowledge Base) or view evidence (Requests) without allowing them to save the files locally to their own devices.

Proposed Future State:

Introduce a permission setting or a configuration option in Jira Service Management and Confluence (Knowledge Base) to:

Disable the "Download" button/action for attachments in the Help Center for both Knowledge Base articles and JSM requests.

Provide an option to "Preview Only" for common file types (PDF, Images, etc.) while restricting the ability to download the source file.

Allow administrators to toggle this restriction at the Project or Portal level.

Alternative (e.g. Third Party Plugin):

There is currently no native workaround to selectively disable downloads while maintaining view access. The only options are:

Removing the attachments entirely and embedding the information as text/images directly on the page (which is not feasible for large documents or specific file types).

Restricting access to the entire article or request, which prevents the user from seeing the necessary information at all.