Managing Confluence Permissions
Confluence is an incredibly useful tool for documentation that feeds in seamlessly with Atlassian’s other essential developer tools like Jira and Bitbucket, but access management within the platform is far from intuitive. If you’ve ever managed a Confluence space, you’ve most likely had a user ask you for access to a page you swear they should already have. This guide aims to clarify various Confluence access management quirks so you’ll always know exactly who can access what in your space.
Managing Space Permissions
To get started, we’ll create a new space then navigate to the “Permissions” section of Space tools in the bottom-left corner. You must be an admin of the space to see these settings.
If you’re not an admin, you’ll see a much more limited view of Space tools. If this is the case, create your own space to follow along.
Once you navigate to the Permissions menu, you should see a section called “Licensed Users.” This section is where you can manage permissions for your whole space. If you created a new space, you should see yourself under “Individual Users” with all green checkmarks in your row indicating you have full permissions for this space. While you can manage individual permissions here, I strongly recommend against it unless you have a particularly small number of users that each need very different levels of access. Instead of using Individual permissions, managing permissions through Groups will be much more maintainable.
Managing Group Permissions
Group permissions work the same way as Individual permissions, except they can be applied to multiple users at the same time. By default, Confluence contains the group “confluence-users” which include every licensed user within your Confluence deployment. If you’d like everyone at your company to be able to read some part of documentation, add the “confluence-users” group to your space then toggle on the “View” permission. If you’d like anyone outside of your company to be able to read some part of your documentation, you can do the same thing for the “Anonymous” group farther down the page under “Anonymous Access.” By default, Anonymous users a restricted from viewing anything within a licensed Confluence space.
To create your own groups, navigate over to the CSUM, or Custom Space User Management section. From here you can create your own groups and add users to those groups. Users can be in multiple groups, so when creating groups, try to think of them with permissions and team organization in mind. The best part of groups is that you can manage access to your space on groups that are created in other spaces.
Managing Page Permissions
Once you’ve decided the overall structure of your space permissions (who should be able to see something in your space), you can further refine access based on your individual pages or page directories. At the top of every page next to the directory location a small “lock” icon appears. These icons indicate what permission restrictions exist on the page and allow admins to edit those restrictions.
The page structure in Confluence acts like a Folder structure on a computer. If you create a page underneath another page, the parent page acts like a top level directory for the child page. Restrictions that are placed on the parent page are inherited by the children pages. When looking at the permissions of a child page, you might see that there are “inherited view restrictions.”
These inherited view restrictions come from a parent page higher in the page directory. To find exactly what restrictions are in place, you may have to go to every parent page higher in the directory to see what their restrictions are, since the restrictions placed on child pages are cumulative. Since this parsing can be tedious, I strongly recommend limiting the number of restrictions you place on individual pages to only a handful of the highest directory pages, if any at all. Instead, it’s usually better to manage groups in your overall space permissions.
Final Thoughts
Decide on a system before you start managing permissions, and don’t be afraid to reorganize your documentation with an access management lens. Favor space permissions over page permissions, and group permissions over individual permissions. For additional reading and a more comprehensive dive into permissions, take a look at Confluence’s own documentation:
