A unified way to share and manage access to content in Confluence

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Admins,

I couldn’t be more excited to announce that starting today, customers will begin to see enhancements and updates to how you manage sharing and access across all content types in Confluence Cloud.

Sharing should be simple, intuitive, and stress-free. These updates to sharing put everything – content restrictions, access management, and sharing options – into a single, streamlined flow. Check it out!

Note: If you don’t see the updates to sharing and managing access yet, don’t worry! You should see it in the coming days or weeks as we roll it out across all Confluence sites.

What to expect 

A single place to share and manage access

Prior to these changes rolling out, you had to go to two separate places to manage content restrictions and notify your collaborators.

• The padlock icon is where content restrictions and access were managed

• The Share button is where notifications were sent from

Now, from a single Share button and through a unified flow, you can modify content restrictions, notify users and groups when you give them access, and easily share content. Because we know that links to your content (Page, Whiteboard, Database) are frequently shared, we also added the button for ‘copy link’ to the Share button too!

In addition, the features you loved from the old experience, like inspecting permissions to understand if someone could access your content, sharing to Slack, and turning content into public links, are also now all in one place.

Quickly identify who has access to your content

In the General access section, easily identify whether the content is open to anyone in the space or restricted to specific people.

Smart suggestions for who to share with

We’re making it easier to share content with your frequent collaborators by presenting quick-add buttons. When you select one of these quick-add people, they’ll be added directly to the user field in one click. No need to search for them.

Expandable specific access

For a more streamlined experience, we’ve collapsed the list of users with specific access into a summary statement. Simply expand to see the full detailed list.

Personalized share notifications

Choose whether to notify newly added people. You can notify with a standard system message or include a custom message. Alternatively, you can uncheck the box to simply grant access quietly without notifying anyone. The choice is yours!

Warnings when sharing with groups prevent accidental oversharing

It’s more efficient to use groups to manage access at scale. Now we’ve given you more control over notifications when managing access with groups. When sharing with a group, you'll get a warning before notifying everyone in that group to protect you against accidentally notifying too many people.

Better awareness when there are access problems (and quick fixes to them!)

Now, when you try to share with someone who, at the end of it, won’t have the intended access due to space access or parent content restrictions, you’ll get a message alerting you to the issue. And, if you’re empowered to grant access to the space or parent content, you’ll be able to do so with one click to prevent an access problem from happening.

For example, say you’re sharing with a colleague who is restricted from viewing the parent content item. Because they can’t view the parent, they also can’t view the child, even though they’re not explicitly restricted from viewing the child.

What’s not changing

Rest assured, no access is changing as a result of these updates. Restricted content stays restricted, open content stays open, and individual access remains as per your current settings.

What’s coming next

We’re just getting started with improvements sharing and access in Confluence!

Coming soon:

• New ways to request access to content.

• A home for managing content access requests. No more chasing them down in email or in-app notifications.

• Teams in Share and other places you manage access, alongside users and groups.

• Better warning messaging when sharing with groups, so you know exactly how many people will be notified.

• More flexible Specific access. Adding someone specific? They’ll be added to the Specific access list. Period. No matter the access state.

Learn more about these updates

Knowing where to manage access and share is important to all Confluence users. To make sure everyone knows about these updates, we’ve incorporated in-product messaging to guide users through the changes.

You can also explore our documentation to see all of the changes to sharing in Confluence

• Manage permissions at the content level
• Change who can find content and what they can do with it
• Share Confluence content
• Troubleshoot access problems to content

As always, let us know what you think of the new unified sharing experience in the comments below!

- Marie and the Confluence Permissions team

[Darryl Lee]

@Marie Casabonne thanks for the news.

I wonder if you can clarify an old question and let us know how these new changes may affect things.

There are currently two "short links" that Confluence provides, as @Mark de Bont asked back in 2023, but for which nobody from Atlassian proper ever answered:

• Two different types of tiny links? which to use? 

As @Chris Kite later clarified the old "Links" button had the same "Tiny Link" that is on the Page Information page in this format:

<mysite>.atlassian.net/wiki/x/XXXX 

But the new Share button includes a Link that changes every time you hit it:

<mysite>.atlassian.net/l/cp/XXXX

At the time, @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-  theorized that the latter Share links might be temporary, and that they might be revocable or expire? But I've never seen such a feature.

At any rate, would love to hear what you know about that.

And I'm wondering what type of "Short Link" will the new Unified Sharing use? I assume (HOPE) that all old links will still persist, since those could live in many places outside of Confluence (emails/Word/Powerpoint/PDFs).

SIDENOTE: I recently was asked to write an automation to get # Comments and # Unique Viewers for Confluence pages that were linked in Jira tickets in a URL field. UNFORTUNATELY many of these links were entered as Tiny or Share Links.

The problem is that the API endpoints to get total comments or unique viewers require a PageID. And there is no API to reverse-engineer a PageID from a Tiny or Share Link. So I have to take the fairly sketchy step of making a Web Request to the Tiny or Share Link and trying to scrape the contents (using the match text function) of the page to find the PageID.

Sometimes Web Requests follows the redirect, sometimes it doesn't. So... about 1/2 the time I fail to get the PageID because the content that I'm trying to scrape isn't consistent. Fun times.

But hey, congrats on the new feature!

[Steve Rhodes]

And how exactly does this compare to the feature we have now? Am I right in that its a merger of the restrictions and sharing dialogue plus some tidying up and the following three features?

Smart suggestions
Personalised share notifications
Warning when sharing with groups

[Amy Carey]

I see the notification checkbox defaults to on/yes. Is there a way to globally turn off the notification checkbox so it is not checked when using the Share button? Have the notification checkbox default to off/no?