Best ways to collaborate with externals partners or customers in Confluence ?

[Mickaël PERRIN]

Hi,

We are thinking about using Confluence as our main writing tool for internal use but also to share knowledge and work with our external customer / partners.

In this process, we need to :

• manage permissions between customers,
• manage permission inside a customer space, some pages are for internal use, others to be shared with customers,
• manage revisions of pages to be shared with customers : work on a draft and validation workflow before sharing with customer,
• collecting customer's annotations / comments on some pages.

Do you have some advices on how to achieve this ?

Currently I am thinking about :

1. Using a space for each customer
2. Creating a sub-space for the pages who need to be shared
3. Using the plugin ad-hoc workflow to manage revisions
4. Using a plugin or a script to export each space as static pages with a public website

However, I have no idea how to get and sync comments on this external website. Maybe using an annotation tool and writing a script to publish as comments in th e original space, but need a lot of programming.

Maybe you have some advices to implement this in a more sraight forward way ?

Regards,

[Matt Reiner]

You could also try the Scroll Versions app for confluence. We use it to write and publish our user guide online and it lets you manage multiple versions and revisions of content and you can publish to many different spaces.

You could then grant space access to your customers/partners. If you're unsure, I recommend reaching out to the team who makes the app; they've been very helpful to us in the past.

[Mehmet Kazgan]

Frankly using page restrictions should handle all that. You can restrict the view until you are ready. You would create customer-confluence groups and manage restrictions in a single space.