Necessity of built-in "confluence-administrators" and "confluence-users" groups?

[Network Administrator]

I am not seeing the confluence-administrators and confluence-users groups in either Confluence or Crowd. We must have removed them. We are using Active Directory groups to give out permissions. We haven't had any issues with this setup; in fact, it is much less confusing using only one directory. But now someone is having issues seeing certain spaces in Confluence. He did some reading, and he seems to think it's because we're no longer using the built-in Confluence groups. The way we have our permissions now is I have set up groups in Active Directory that I mapped to roles in Confluence (see attachments).

So what I'm asking is: Is it okay to no longer have the built-in Confluence groups, or are they necessary in some situations?

[Daniel Borcherding · Accepted solution]

The expand a bit further we have the following issues in out public tracker.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-22778

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-26864

These issues detail the ways in which removing confluence-users can impact your instance.

TLDR; There are certain hard coded features of Confluence that rely on these group names. You may not run into these issues, but things can go downhill very quickly if you don't have these groups.

As Bruna points out, these groups are very easy to recreate. It is also important to make sure their group permissions are set correctly.

[Network Administrator]

Thanks so much for your input. I actually was able to get on the phone with Bruna and her colleage. What I was told was that indeed these groups do need to exist; however, if using Crowd with Active Directory, they don't need to be used as long as the permissions are set up properly for the groups that I am using in Global Permissions and Space Permissions.

[Bruna Griebeler]

Hi there!

In fact both confluence-users and confluence-administrators are mandatory for Confluence to run properly.

So you don't have this groups anymore you can create them again. Just bear in mind that confluence-users group and confluence-administrators have set their permissions on Global Permissions.

[francis]

So,

Suppose you have 2 confluence instances, both connecting through crowd, one licensed for
500 users, the next to 2000 users.

How do you set up the global permissions such that we don't need to upgrade our 500 user license to 2000 ?

Francis