Role-based access in Confluence enters its next phase

[#1]

Roles are coming to Confluence, and the next phase is here

If you’ve been following along over the past few years, you know that Confluence is on a mission to make managing user access exponentially easier. In March, we launched a new way to share in Confluence, and since June, Confluence roles have been available in Beta.

Today, we’re announcing the next phase of our Confluence roles rollout, which has 3 parts:

1. Tools to plan your roles rollout
2. A roles-only access experience for new Confluence sites
3. Changes to Cloud data migrations experiences to ensure backward compatibility across access modes

1. Tools to plan your roles rollout

To help you plan for Confluence roles, we’re introducing two new resources for Confluence admins — Roles Central and permissions data exports.

Roles Central

Roles Central is a one-stop shop for your transition — all the tools and everything you need to know to assign roles to users across your whole site. 

Export permissions data

Before you can start assigning roles, you’ll likely need a plan. To create that plan, you’ll need a clear picture of how permissions are being used across your site. Enter permissions data exports.

First, you can get a complete view of all the combinations of individual permissions currently used on your site, ordered by most commonly used. Second, you can export the full access lists of each space on your site.

Together, these 2 exports will help you:

1. Understand how your current permissions map to Confluence’s default roles
2. Plan what custom roles you’ll need to create
   
   

*Note: All Confluence admins, whether your organization is enrolled in the roles beta or not, will have access to these resources directly in Confluence settings.

2. Roles only experience for new Confluence sites

To simplify the space access administration experience for new customers, we’ve made it so that when you create a new Confluence site (in a new or existing Atlassian org), it will use roles, and only roles, for managing space access.

This means that everything from site defaults to space access, Company hub access to Automations that set and update space access, will all do so using roles. There won’t be an option to assign any access with individual permissions, without a role.

3. Backward compatibility support for Cloud data migrations

To ensure all permissions data is safely transferred when running cloud data migrations, the destination Confluence Cloud instance’s space access mode will always land in “roles transition” mode, also known as roles beta. 

Learn more about each migration flow and if it’s impacted by these roles changes.

The future: all customers will get roles

We can’t wait for the roles beta to come to an end and for every customer to have roles, and we’re hard at work building some exciting features to help with your transition.

For now, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the resources in Roles Central where you can get an up-to-date picture of your site’s permissions data, see how your site and spaces are set up, and plan for the types of roles you’ll need.

Thanks!

The Confluence Permissions team

[Jared Schmitt]

Sounds great @Marie Casabonne ! Any chance the Roles Central stays in an admin's tool chest even after the rollout of the feature is completed?

[Rita Nygren]

Any timeline?  I'll have to fit this in among other priority projects

[Wayne_Reilly]

Can we please have a reasonable heads up when this is coming. Please do not dump this on our lap like all the recent UI changes.

[Marie Casabonne]

@Jared Schmitt - Glad you're a Roles central fan! What features are you finding will bring the most longterm value to your team? 

@Rita Nygren & @Wayne_Reilly - We plan to share a GA timeline within the next few months, giving you plenty of notice and time to transition. We're committed to making this as smooth as possible for your teams.