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A unified way to share and manage access to content in Confluence

Hello Atlassian Admins,

I couldn’t be more excited to announce that starting today, customers will begin to see enhancements and updates to how you manage sharing and access across all content types in Confluence Cloud.

Sharing should be simple, intuitive, and stress-free. These updates to sharing put everything – content restrictions, access management, and sharing options – into a single, streamlined flow. Check it out!

 

Note: If you don’t see the updates to sharing and managing access yet, don’t worry! You should see it in the coming days or weeks as we roll it out across all Confluence sites.

 

What to expect 

A single place to share and manage access

Prior to these changes rolling out, you had to go to two separate places to manage content restrictions and notify your collaborators.

  • The padlock icon is where content restrictions and access were managed

  • The Share button is where notifications were sent from

Now, from a single Share button and through a unified flow, you can modify content restrictions, notify users and groups when you give them access, and easily share content. Because we know that links to your content (Page, Whiteboard, Database) are frequently shared, we also added the button for ‘copy link’ to the Share button too!

 

New share button.png

 

In addition, the features you loved from the old experience, like inspecting permissions to understand if someone could access your content, sharing to Slack, and turning content into public links, are also now all in one place.

 

Full modal tour.png

 

Quickly identify who has access to your content

In the General access section, easily identify whether the content is open to anyone in the space or restricted to specific people.

ManageAccess2.gif

Smart suggestions for who to share with

We’re making it easier to share content with your frequent collaborators by presenting quick-add buttons. When you select one of these quick-add people, they’ll be added directly to the user field in one click. No need to search for them.

smart_suggestions.png

Expandable specific access

For a more streamlined experience, we’ve collapsed the list of users with specific access into a summary statement. Simply expand to see the full detailed list.

expandable specific access.png

Personalized share notifications

Choose whether to notify newly added people. You can notify with a standard system message or include a custom message. Alternatively, you can uncheck the box to simply grant access quietly without notifying anyone. The choice is yours!

share notifications.png

Warnings when sharing with groups prevent accidental oversharing

It’s more efficient to use groups to manage access at scale. Now we’ve given you more control over notifications when managing access with groups. When sharing with a group, you'll get a warning before notifying everyone in that group to protect you against accidentally notifying too many people.

group warning.png

Better awareness when there are access problems (and quick fixes to them!)

Now, when you try to share with someone who, at the end of it, won’t have the intended access due to space access or parent content restrictions, you’ll get a message alerting you to the issue. And, if you’re empowered to grant access to the space or parent content, you’ll be able to do so with one click to prevent an access problem from happening.

For example, say you’re sharing with a colleague who is restricted from viewing the parent content item. Because they can’t view the parent, they also can’t view the child, even though they’re not explicitly restricted from viewing the child.

blocked access.png

 

What’s not changing

Rest assured, no access is changing as a result of these updates. Restricted content stays restricted, open content stays open, and individual access remains as per your current settings.

 

What’s coming next

We’re just getting started with improvements sharing and access in Confluence!

Coming soon:

  • New ways to request access to content.

  • A home for managing content access requests. No more chasing them down in email or in-app notifications.

  • Teams in Share and other places you manage access, alongside users and groups.

  • Better warning messaging when sharing with groups, so you know exactly how many people will be notified.

  • More flexible Specific access. Adding someone specific? They’ll be added to the Specific access list. Period. No matter the access state.

 

Learn more about these updates

Knowing where to manage access and share is important to all Confluence users. To make sure everyone knows about these updates, we’ve incorporated in-product messaging to guide users through the changes.

You can also explore our documentation to see all of the changes to sharing in Confluence

 

As always, let us know what you think of the new unified sharing experience in the comments below!

- Marie and the Confluence Permissions team

 

13 comments

Darryl Lee
Community Champion
March 24, 2025

@Marie Casabonne thanks for the news.

I wonder if you can clarify an old question and let us know how these new changes may affect things.

There are currently two "short links" that Confluence provides, as @Mark de Bont asked back in 2023, but for which nobody from Atlassian proper ever answered:

As @Chris Kite later clarified the old "Links" button had the same "Tiny Link" that is on the Page Information page in this format:

<mysite>.atlassian.net/wiki/x/XXXX 

But the new Share button includes a Link that changes every time you hit it:

<mysite>.atlassian.net/l/cp/XXXX

At the time, @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-  theorized that the latter Share links might be temporary, and that they might be revocable or expire? But I've never seen such a feature.

At any rate, would love to hear what you know about that.

And I'm wondering what type of "Short Link" will the new Unified Sharing use? I assume (HOPE) that all old links will still persist, since those could live in many places outside of Confluence (emails/Word/Powerpoint/PDFs).

SIDENOTE: I recently was asked to write an automation to get # Comments and # Unique Viewers for Confluence pages that were linked in Jira tickets in a URL field. UNFORTUNATELY many of these links were entered as Tiny or Share Links.

The problem is that the API endpoints to get total comments or unique viewers require a PageID. And there is no API to reverse-engineer a PageID from a Tiny or Share Link. So I have to take the fairly sketchy step of making a Web Request to the Tiny or Share Link and trying to scrape the contents (using the match text function) of the page to find the PageID.

Sometimes Web Requests follows the redirect, sometimes it doesn't. So... about 1/2 the time I fail to get the PageID because the content that I'm trying to scrape isn't consistent. Fun times.

But hey, congrats on the new feature!

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Steve Rhodes
Rising Star
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March 25, 2025

And how exactly does this compare to the feature we have now? Am I right in that its a merger of the restrictions and sharing dialogue plus some tidying up and the following three features?

Smart suggestions
Personalised share notifications
Warning when sharing with groups

Amy Carey
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March 27, 2025

I see the notification checkbox defaults to on/yes. Is there a way to globally turn off the notification checkbox so it is not checked when using the Share button? Have the notification checkbox default to off/no?

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Don McFall
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Those new to the Atlassian Community have posted less than three times. Give them a warm welcome!
March 31, 2025

Why was this rolled out before sharing with teams was included?  We have users that have been using that feature and now, unexpectedly, can no longer do so.  This is a reduction in functionality for them.

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Shelley Duncan
Contributor
March 31, 2025

This is a nasty way of merging 2 x features which worked perfectly separately before. I take it this merge of features will somehow help the new navigation being pushed out. Currently to add a new restricted user, you have to 'share', not save. I have multiple users contacting me saying they can no longer share, when really, they are seeing the 'You do not have permission to change access to this content', meaning they can't change the restrictions, which has nothing to do with sharing. This is clunky, confusing and embarrassing. There are so many bugs which require attention, meanwhile, time is spent making the GUI less user-friendly. I'm really disappointed with this change. Sharing and Restrictions should be separate. However, I do agree when you try to share with someone who doesn't have access, you should receive an alert. Restricting access is a security feature which is restricted to particular users. Users who are trying to share a page should not be confronted with messages saying they can't restrict. Counter intuitive. 

Marie Casabonne
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 7, 2025

Hi @Darryl Lee

Thanks for your feedback. With this release, the Share button copy link action and the copy link action in the modal footer both build links in the following format: <mysite>.atlassian.net/wiki/x/XXXX 

Any links that follow the other format (<mysite>.atlassian.net/l/cp/XXXX) will still work and redirect to your content.

Sorry to hear about the scripting challenges with the short URLs. I’ll circle back to this comment after I touch base with a few teams to see if there are any other solutions we can recommend for getting the pageID from the short URLs.

Like Todd Thomas likes this
Marie Casabonne
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 7, 2025

Hi @Steve Rhodes 

Yes, you’re spot on! This release is a unification of the two experiences you mentioned (access management via the restrictions dialog and sharing via the share dialog) into a single workflow. In addition to the features you highlighted, we also introduced blocked access awareness when sharing with individuals who will not have the necessary access due to parent content restrictions or space access. This integration lays the groundwork for future enhancements we plan to introduce noted in the "What's coming next" section above!

Like Todd Thomas likes this
Marie Casabonne
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 7, 2025

Thanks for your questions, @Amy Carey 

Yes, the default for sharing is notifications on. As of now, there is no global toggle to turn this setting off.

Marie Casabonne
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 7, 2025

Hey @Don McFall

I understand how important sharing with Teams is for your workflow, and I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused by its temporary absence. We made the tough decision to release the new sharing experience without this feature because Teams currently can't be granted access to content or spaces. Rest assured, bringing back this functionality with full support to share and grant access to Teams is a priority for us, and we're working on it.

Marie Casabonne
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 7, 2025

Hi @Shelley Duncan , 

Thank you for sharing your feedback. I understand the transition to a unified access and sharing workflow has been challenging, and I'm sorry for any frustration the changes have caused for your users. While this change is separate from the new navigation updates, it is part of our broader effort to modernize Confluence's user interfaces and workflows.

Regarding your concerns:

  • Adding a user to restricted content: You can still grant access without notifying the user by unchecking the “Notify newly added people” checkbox. This allows you to add users without sending them a notification.
  • Sharing content that you cannot manage access to: The unified workflow now manages both sharing and access. If users can only share content due to restrictions, we inform them in the modal to prevent confusion about access permissions.

I appreciate your feedback and am glad you find the blocked access awareness feature useful. Your input is valuable as we continue to improve the sharing experience.

Shelley Duncan
Contributor
April 7, 2025

@Marie Casabonne  but it is causing confusion. A user who cannot restrict, but can share is presented with this 'You do not have permission to change access to this content', and they automatically think they cannot share. All of a sudden, 2 simple and obvious features have been merged, causing mass confusion.  This is not user friendly at all. I can't even access Restrictions via the ... menu anymore. If it isn't broke, don't fix it. This was working perfectly before, now, not at all. If users have to ask how to use a basic feature, you haven't done your job properly. 

P_D_ Foerster
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
April 8, 2025

I'm torn by the change as other have already commented.

Please also think about the following:

  • Example user John is space admin and is able to grant other users and groups access to space content via the new option "add to space" during the modal "some people need additional access".
  • John shared with a group instead of single users and added it to the space as suggested (blue button background).

Does John know who is member of that group? 

As far as I know only user access admin, site admins and org-admins are able to view group members.

It could be that the group contains external users and John isn't aware of it.

❓ Questions

  • Do you have plans to show group members to users who are trying to share content with that specific group?
  • Do you have plans to restrict available groups only to those that the current user is a member of?
P_D_ Foerster
Rising Star
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April 8, 2025

-- removed --

Reason: community platform is too slow in general and displayed agreement again.

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