Are you planning to simplify Confluence's space permission system?

[Matt Martin]

context

I manage a fairly large instance of Confluence (13k active users). We've grown quickly and a few things have become apparent to me as this has taken place.

The largest of which centers around Confluence's out of the box permission system. It's a fine system when an instance is relatively small. The granularity isn't an overhead.

problem

However, it quickly became a significant operational cost (not only to myself, but also to the wider user base). The reality being, what is loud and clear from the large group of people who have to add and remove people from space permissions lists is that a better solution needs to be developed, so we started tackling the issue.

The obvious answer was groups, however, you can't expose groups in such a way that a simple space admin user can access them without giving them far more than just groups, and I don't want to open up groups to a wide audience anyway. That's a bad decision.

our solution

So, with the help of Confiforms and Scriptrunner, we built access through APIs to the groups functionality such that, when a space is provisioned, it's provisioned with an admin (eg, spacekey-admin), edit, and a readonly group (if the requested space wants restrictions), and a space admin level user (with no back end access) can interact with a form to add and remove users from their space specific groups in real-time.

It works, and over the past 12 months, it's been a life saver drastically cutting down support requests and the rest.

question

I wanted to ask, are there any plans to formally introduce a system like this to the product? When your user base scales, it's about short, simple interactions and the space permissions page is generally not that.

[Shannon S]

Hello Matt,

Thank you for reaching out, and I'm terribly sorry that your question has gone so long without a response.

I spoke with the development team about your query. In general, the Confluence roadmap plans are not published, so I cannot confirm with you the exact changes that would come in the future in terms of the permission system. I can tell you that we are always looking at permissions and ways to make the user experience better.

I found a few feature requests that I think could really improve how permissions work in Confluence, and they do have quite a few votes already. If you are interested in any of these, please be sure to vote and comment with your usage case!

• CONFSERVER-7089 create the ability to 'add' page permissions for users and groups
• CONFSERVER-1053 Bulk space permissions editing for global administrators
• CONFSERVER-1514 Permission to invite others into group
• CONFSERVER-36726 ability to set personal/global space default permissions
• CONFSERVER-38722 Not possible to restrict users to edit page contents without grant add permission in all the space.

Do let me know if you have any further concerns or questions and I will be happy to address them.

Regards,

Shannon