Using Confluence as a Client Portal

[Christopher Wilson]

Hello,

I would like to create a folder in Confluence and then invite external clients to be able to access the folder, including all pages in the folder. However, I don't want them to be able to access any of the other content in our Confluence instance. 

Typically, our clients will have 1-2 users who will need access to the content. 

How do I set this up? What kind of licenses do I need to allow this to work?

Thx,

Chris

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Christopher Wilson 

If you only want to open up only a selection of a Confluence space, you can use a combo of apps by K15t - Scroll Documents and Scroll Viewport

With Documents, you designate a section of your space as a 'document', then use Viewport to create a static website from that 'document'.

You can also use Comala Publishing to sync selected pages between two spaces - call them source and target. The Target space will only feature the selected pages and you can make it anonymous. Users will only see the contents of the target space.

For Confluence only solution... you can use Public links features for individual pages.

[Scott Beeson]

We did this for a partner. We created a new space just for them. We then invited them as "Guest users". It worked really well.

It looks like this was made generally available in June of 23. It also says it's limited to 5 users for free, but I'm positive we had about a dozen and didn't pay for them.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/Single-space-guests-now-on-Confluence-Cloud/ba-p/2121527

[Kristian Klima]

@Scott Beeson - Guests are an option but they can see the entire space to which they're granted access.

[Scott Beeson]

Yes, which would be my recommendation. Trying to granularly control permissions for pages and different external users poses much more risk. For starters, not only is it more time consuming to manage (and error prone), but there is no simple way for content creators and other users to delineate. In other words, as an internal user, on our normal company space, I see a page and it doesn't cross my mind that it could be externally accessible. Whereas with a dedicated company space, you can add a custom header (which is what we did) that says THIS SPACE ACCESSIBLE BY COMPANY NAME or similar, based on compliance/legal requirements.

• Company Space 1
• Company Space 2
• Company Space 3
• etc.

Just my two cents.