Granting Access to Specific External Representative with Access to Single Space ONLY

[Charisma Riley]

We have a rep who would like to keep our teams up-to-date on their products that we use, using a Space in our Confluence Cloud instance. We would need to grant access somehow to only this person and restrict them to a specific Space made just for their use. Is this possible?

[James Dellow]

You can configure Confluence Cloud to support a concept of "internal" and "external" users. This is a slide from my 2014 Summit presentation that talks about this:

For your use case, you probably need to change your approach to space permissions and not use confluence-users group by default. Then you can grant that specific user access as a named user to a single space.

[Shannon S]

Thank you James! I believe this might be similar instructions to the article I linked Charisma above. Could you confirm if it is or is not, and if not, how does it differ?

Regards,

Shannon

[James Dellow]

Yeah, effectively the same. However, I do prefer the idea of retaining an "everyone" group and not using it by default in spaces, rather than removing people from it. I have created Confluence sites before where we needed a common space that contained some shared image and file assets. In another site we created a welcome space, used for on-boarding and communication to all users (both internal and external).

So permissions model would be based on:

• confluence-users (everyone)
• internal users only group
• ad hoc external user groups for specific spaces

[Shannon S]

Thank you for confirming that, James! 

Charisma - if you have any questions about either method, please feel free to let us know.

Shannon

[Charisma Riley]

We are set to try it out. I will report back soon.

[Shannon S]

Hello Charisma,

I assume you've already seen this documentation?

• How to grant access to one space only to a user in Confluence

If so, could you let me know if you had any issues with that article specifically? I'm happy to help you if you're stuck.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Shannon

[Charisma Riley]

Well, the primary issue is that this does not allow an external user access. We have a third-party rep who wants to have a space to update. I am looking into whether that is a really secure option, since I see literally two options: 1) create an internal user for him. Although there is supposedly a way to limit him to one space, I also see vulnerabilities, so that concerns me, and option 2) we create a space and grant anonymous access, meaning anyone with the link that contribute. This sounds potentially dangerous. So, yeah. . . if you have more input on that part, I'd love to hear it.

[Shannon S]

Charisma,

You can only control permissions for a user who has a license in Confluence. Otherwise, they're just an anonymous user, so yes, you would need to grant anonymous access for them to access the site without a license.

About your concern, what vulnerabilities do you see if you were to limit him to one space being a licensed Confluence user? I'm not aware of any, provided that you set up the permissions properly according to that article. If you can let me know what concerns you specifically, I can help to alleviate that.

Regards,

Shannon

[Eric Sebian]

Hi Shannon. This didnt work for me. I configured as insturcted but about 14 of the 50 spaces are still visible to the user. see images. Please advise.