Knowledge Base articles can't be opened in the customer portal if Confluence Cloud is not configured with anonymous access

Issue Summary

When integrating Service Desk Server with a Confluence Cloud Space to serve customers with a knowledge base, the customers are required to be logged in to Confluence Cloud for the Integration to work seamlessly. 

When the customer is not logged in, instead of displaying the KB article or the log in screen in the customer portal in an iFrame, the following will happen:

• in Chrome, a grey page will show in the iFrame. There is a link available on the page which allows the user to open the page in a new window, so that they can log into Confluence Cloud. However, this link is very small and can be easily missed:

  Open Site in New Window
  

• in Firefox, the following message will appear in the iFrame:

  Firefox can't open this page.
  Open Site in New Window
  

• in Safari: The issue is not present, however Safari opens each KB article in a new tab instead of the iframe

Notes

• This issue only impacts the integration between Service Desk Server and Confluence Cloud
  • This issue does not impact the integration between Service Desk Server and Confluence Server
• The integration between Service Desk Server and Confluence Cloud is only available in Service Desk Server version 4.12.0 and above.

Steps to replicate

• Setup a Confluence Cloud without anonymous access on the whole instance (so that users have to login to access any Confluence page)
• Create a space in Confluence Cloud, and will be used as a Knowledge Base space, and add at least one page to that space
• Setup Service Desk Server on any version from 4.12.0 or above
• Create a Service Desk project, and configure it with a Knowledge Base coming from Confluence Cloud, as per Set up a knowledge base with Confluence Cloud
• Log into the Customer Portal, with a user who is not already logged in into Confluence Cloud
• Search for a KB article from Confluence Cloud, in the Customer portal. You should be shown some result:
  
• Click on the KB article to open it in an iFrame

Expected results

The KB article or the log in screen should be displayed in an iFrame:

Actual results

• In Chrome, a grey page will show in the iFrame (along with a very small link at the bottom of the page that can be used to open the page in a new window). Also, the following error will be displayed in the browser console:

  Refused to display 'https://id.atlassian.com/' in a frame because it set 'X-Frame-Options' to 'sameorigin'.
  

  

• in Firefox, the following message will appear in the iFrame:

  Firefox can't open this page.
  Open Site in New Window
  

  

Workarounds

Workaround 1

Firefox: Click on the button displayed in the place of the article and log in to Confluence in another tab. Then you can go back to the Customer Portal and view all the articles you have access to.

Chrome, Firefox and other browsers: Click on the "View article in new window" link that is displayed below where the article should be.

Workaround 2

Configure the Confluence Cloud instance with anonymous access, as per Setting Up Public Access.

In addition to this, also configure the Confluence Cloud KB Space with anonymous access:

With such configuration, Service Desk customers will no longer have to be logged into Confluence Cloud to view any KB article, and the KB article will be displayed in the iFrame.

Please note, that individual page trees and pages in Confluence can be configured to follow different permission restriction, and not be available to the anonymous users together with the KB articles that are.

Suggestions for this feature request

Note that this ticket is raised as a feature request, since the current behavior is expected by design, and is explained in the documentation Set up a knowledge base with Confluence Cloud.
However, this current behavior may cause a lot of confusion for the end user, since end users might not be aware that they are supposed to be logged into Confluence Cloud prior to opening any KB article.

Also, when using Chrome, all the user sees is a gray page with a very small link at the bottom, giving the option to open the page in a new window, which is not very user friendly.

Some improvement suggestions are the following:

• make the link "Open Site in New Window" bigger or more visible to the end user, so that it's more obvious to them that they need to open the page in a new window to log into Confluence?
• or maybe add a big banner/warning telling the customers that they need to log into Confluence in a new window?