Today’s topic opens up a whole new world… of permissions! 🔐 See below for guidance on securely collaborating with external users within your (virtual) walls.
Let’s break it down by product:
Confluence
Here’s how to invite guest users to a Confluence space (without provisioning them a license), and what guests can see and do within that space.
- Invite them to join your Atlassian organization.
- Give them product access to Confluence as a guest.
- Assign them the space they’ll be collaborating in.
While bringing external users to your site can open up a world of collaboration, there are default space permissions set for guests to ensure you’re giving them access to only what you intended.
The settings for guests are as follows:
While Confluence is designed to be open and collaborative, view and access permissions can be customized to make your site, spaces, and pages as open or closed as you want. This is a good page to reference for additional info.
Jira
Jira also has the flexibility to configure what users can do/see. The simplest way to effectively manage external users is to:
- Provision them with a license in Jira.
- Assign them a specific project role.
- Customize permission schemes for that role.
TL;DR: Your internal and external users should have two separate roles and permission schemes. Learn how to set this up seamlessly.
To manage this, go to: Settings → Issues → Permission Schemes
In this example, access is granted to project roles, groups, or any logged-in user.
- Any logged in user means (just as it sounds) that ANY user logged into Jira has that permission.
- If it's a permission you do NOT want an external user to have, you'll need to remove Any logged in user from that permission and add a role that your internal users have and external users don’t.
Tip: I’ve found that testing permission settings in a sandbox can be helpful to avoid locking anyone out while making changes.
Lastly, this article on permissions is a good one to keep for reference when you want to look something up. Happy collaborating! (I told you it was a whole new world 😜)
