Unlocking seamless collaboration: the new Confluence sharing experience

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community,

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

[Ollie Guan]

Will there be a permission blocking mode in the future?

As you know, sometimes we want to prevent people in a certain group from accessing a page, but currently we can only create a new group to replace it

[Marie Casabonne]

Hi @Ollie Guan - Thanks for your question.

My understanding from your comment is that a permissions blocking mode would be something like:

• Engineering Managers group (that includes ALL engineering managers across all levels) can View this content
• Steve and Claire, who are in the Engineering Managers group, are individually blocked from viewing this content because the content is only relevant to Senior managers and above, and they are only Managers

Is that how you're envisioning this permissions blocking mode? If so, this is not a feature we currently have planned at this time. Today, if you want to grant a subset of a group access, you can either:

• Great a different group that doesn't include the people who should not have access to certain content
• Add the people who should have access individually (vs via a group)