Unable to administer personal spaces as System Administrator

Elvar Bjarki Böðvarsson

I'm using a user from AD that has System Administrator rights in the global permissions but when I view personal spaces the Space Administrator part never shows up and I can just view the personal space like any other user.

Is there some magic I have to do to get this working?

Jeremy Largman

There's a difference between 'System Administrator' and someone in the 'confluence-administrators' group. It's nested deep in our documentation:

Comparing the Administrator Permissions with the confluence-administrators Group

The 'confluence-administrators' group defines a set of 'super-users' who can access the Administration Console and perform site-wide administration. Members of this group can also see the content of all pages and spaces in the Confluence instance, regardless of space permissions. They cannot immediately see the pages for which they are excluded by page restrictionswithout knowing the direct URL to the page (restrictions can be removed by members of the confluence-administrators group in the Space Admin screen if need be). For example, they will not see restricted pages displayed by the children macro. But they are able to access restricted pages directly using the page URL. The settings on the 'Global Permissions' screen do not affect the powers allowed to members of this group.

Granting the 'System Administrator' or 'Confluence Administrator' permission to a user will not automatically grant the user access to all spaces in the site. These permissions will only give access to the Administration Console.

Be aware, however, that users with 'System Administrator' can add themselves to the 'confluence-administrators' group and become a super-user.

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Confluence Administrator permission and confluence-administrators group are not related Going by the names, you would think the 'confluence-administrators' group and the 'Confluence Administrator' permission are related – but they are not. To resolve confusion, we want to make explicit that granting a user or group 'Confluence Administrator' permission is not the same as granting them membership to the 'confluence-administrators' group. Granting the 'Confluence Administrator' permission enables access to only a subset of the administrative functions. Granting membership to the 'confluence-administrators' group, on the other hand, gives complete access.

Read more about global groups.