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Share confluence page to non user

Tim Chapman1

I am testing sharing some of our confluence content to external users.

I've added an external email address, and the linkis shared, but it then prompts the user to login. They don't have an account. The page specifically states:

"The recipients can be Confluence users or any email addresses."

How can they access the information?

Thanks

Tim

Accepted answers

Gorka Puente {Appfire}

Hi @Tim Chapman,

We're about to release the v2.0 of Share Attachments for Confluence. In this new version, we allow the sharing of pages with non-confluence users, so you can send any page without giving public access to your Confluence instance.

Regards,

Gorka

All comments

Mauro Badii

Hi Tim,

You'll have to enable annonymous access to your Confluence instance.

Take a look at this guide for instructions; https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Setting+Up+Public+Access

Cheers!

Gorka Puente {Appfire}

Hi @Tim Chapman,

Regards,

Gorka

Daniel Schmid

Hi @Mauro Ezequiel Fernandez Badii

@Tim Chapman is askings something different, Sharing a page with external non-confluence user. Like you can do on Google Docs with Share-Link. Something which I also would like to see. Same as my collegues.

Setting up public access for the whole wiki or even a space is not an option. ONLY a secret link for a single Page

@Gorka Puente [Comalatech] unfortunatly your tool does not work with cloud based Confluence OnDemand

Mark Schultheis

Page Not Found - so pick one from the list...whichever matches a need...

Philip Mease

Has anyone a solution for this question yet? I'm in the same boat. Right now it seems like it's either fully private or fully public with no middle ground.

Ashleigh Brennan

8 months later and I'm getting the same issue - anyone have an update on this? Would also like to be able to share a page with a single external user, rather than making it public.

Ashleigh Brennan

Update: There is an add on in the marketplace for this, but it's not free and is only for the server version of Confluence, which doesn't help those of us using the cloud solution.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keinoby.confluence.plugins.share-attachments/server/overview

Surely there has to be a better answer to this?

AnnWorley

If the page is not available to anonymous users and the user does not have an account, they will not be able to see it.

Would it help to export the page and email it to them?

Philip Mease

This one has killed me and have been slowly transitioning to Google Docs, which is actually working out pretty nicely so far. I feel like Atlassian is missing the mark on newer companies who are lean and work with consultants and end-users directly. But maybe that's just me.

AnnWorley

What prevents you from adding an account for the external user, and giving access to just that page? Do you not want to use a license or is there also a technical reason?

Philip Mease

I work with a lot of people from contract manufacturers to beta testers to end users to retailers. They all need access to various bits and it's turning out I need to have a particular users I trust have access to an otherwise private area. Usually these folks aren't employees but end users who are interested in helping develop a product along side. With Google I just enter their email and the permissions heirarchy is as simple as adding it to a folder. I can even have a 'share link' and anyone with that link can see it immediately. No setup or manually creating accounts.

Then there's the licensing issue of taking up seats per account and I'd quickly be paying for lots of users that individually rarely use the tool.

I've done the export thing and that's, well, only read-only and the export is very basic. Some of the pictures don't land right and I also put videos on some pages.

It's just not a very 'sharey' tool. Any public spaces are just that - public and it's the whole space which can be dangerous when you have to go in and restrict individual pages after the fact. There is an area between private/secure and public. And full private is easier to setup on something like Drive as well. All you need is an email. Login issues and me forgetting to unrestrict or set up permissions on a particular page have ended up costing some time and some folks kinda don't want to deal with any of that. The end users in particular (who are being generous to me with their time in the first place) don't want to have to create new accounts and login to a tool that is new to them. Most folks kinda just don't do it. And since they aren't employees I cannot demand anything. So it's got to be easy so I get more folks writing and reading.

So to answer, it's both. Maybe I've missed something major here but I do not think this has been addressed considering no solution has been offered to the OP since 4 years ago outside of the server-based and paid for add-on. So I think it's time to bail, unfortunately.

Ashleigh Brennan

Not really, since exporting the pages makes an absolute mess of formatting a lot of the time, and is limited to Word or PDF. Also means we have to export and import constantly to update, which completely defeats the point of Confluence (intended to reduce our use of emailing documentation back and forth!).

To me this is a serious oversight on Atlassian's part. As mentioned in other comments, even free services like Google Docs allows this kind of sharing!

Ashleigh Brennan

@AnnWorley Still awaiting a response for this. The above comment from @Philip Mease highlights a lot of issues that I think many users are feeling, and so far I've seen nothing from Atlassian to try to remedy the situation.

Ashleigh Brennan

No good for Cloud instances and this is also a paid add-on. There needs to be a better solution.

AnnWorley

There is a suggestion ticket open, requesting the ability to share pages as you are describing: Ability to share a page to an anonymous user with a private URL

Since the suggestion is on our public-facing bug tracker you can add comments and vote, to communicate directly with the development team responsible for adding features.

Ashleigh Brennan

These bugs were created over 3 years ago, and the latest comment, which isn't even from the dev team, is from over 2 months ago. This is simply not at all helpful - just redirecting the problem to someone else. When can we expect to actually see any work happening on this feature? I am amazed that this ticket can be untouched for YEARS, while we were given an entirely new UI experience recently that absolutely nobody asked for. Maybe refocus the dev efforts to something actually helpful?

Ashleigh Brennan

There isn't even a way to vote on the Cloud version of the issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999

The link @AnnWorley has above is for the server version.

[deleted]

[deleted]

[deleted]

Barney

Voting with your feet. I like it!!

Sandy

Tapio Haapala

Lets hope that this come soon. At least as readonly share. Current situation is quite pain when we need make half of documents to google docs.

Caroline Bartle

Hi there - I'm a product manager for Confluence Cloud. Thank you for your comments on this discussion thread, and for the feedback on the use cases where privately sharing with anonymous users is crucial.

As per Ann's earlier comments, there is a feature suggestion open for this where you can comment and vote: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999.

This feature isn't on the Confluence Cloud roadmap, however it hasn't been ruled out for inclusion at some point in the future. It is clear that this type of sharing would be a useful feature, which is why the suggestion hasn't been closed.

Nicholas Hutchings

It seems to me that people have been asking for this since 2014 and clearly there is a need. I notice that someone has even developed an external plugin (unfortunately just for the server solution I gather). So I don't understand why this feature isn't on the roadmap for cloud. Perhaps not a high priority for you, but still worthy of road mapping.

From my point of view, it is yet another reason for me to look for a solution elsewhere. And bit by bit I get to the point where Atlassian just no longer rates on my radar. This feature could help with stickiness for your customers, but it's just pushing me away. First helpdesk ticketing now knowledge base ... once I move those away, I could then question whether Jira has a place in our business.

Eliav Ozeri

@Nicholas Hutchings I totally agree, I don't understand their logic behind this, I really like Jira but they seem to be pushing their customers away, if you have any good suggestions on where to move, please share.

Nicholas Hutchings

To be honest @Eliav - we've reached the stage of building in-house with a wordpress instance. Also looking at the Zoho wiki option that comes with their Helpdesk

Jörg Zeipelt

Confluence & Jira have extremely clunky roles and rights managements. We are strongly thinking about switching to other tools.

Chadd Bennett

Confluence's collaboration features are awesome, and so is the goal to centralize knowledge and information. Understandably licensing is part of the business model, and most sharing occurs between internal users, but we all share information externally!

But without anonymous external sharing of individual pages, our users will just default to duplicating content (no!) in a free competitor's platform, such as Google Drive or OneDrive.

From the IT side, it makes alternatives more appealing to not have to provision new users anytime someone wants to share externally, or worry a plugin will break on an upgrade. Sharepoint, heck, even the open source Documize has external sharing with link expiration.

While the aforementioned alternatives offer "free" external user access, even offering cheap buckets of "external user licenses" limited to x pages would be better than nothing.

On the upside, it might drive actually drive additional license purchases to avoid "Who is Anonymous Aardvark", and might get new users to see how great Confluence is and tell their teams about it!

Atlassian Team, what do you all use when you need to collaborate externally with an external partner on a just a single or few pages ... do you provision new users and futz around with permissions?

Prashanth-GB

+1 for this feature. I understand the complexity of sharing a page with external non confluence users if the page has links to other Confluence pages.

But atleast to start with, we should get this feature without thinking about links to other Confluence pages within shared page.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

NO! Implementing a botch without thinking about security would be fatal.

It would be illegal to do this to Confluence in the second largest Atlassian marketplace and soon the third as well (unless it could be globally disabled, in which case you might as well not implement it)

PLEASE, think about data security before making silly statements like that.

thomas king

Why is this marked *solved*? It is not solved.

I have recommended Confluence many times in the past, but today as an influencer, I can no longer recommend Confluence--this is one of many reasons.

By not addressing the awkward roles and rights mgmt, (and other long-standing short-comings) Atlassian is begging for people to go elsewhere. They create an opportunity for better solutions which have addressed these and other flaws.

My current company is very unlikely to pick Confluence.

Eliav Ozeri

Nic Brough I do understand your concern regarding the security, and I also would love to see that dealt with, however, for the love of god, how hard will it be for them to allow sharing pages that DON'T have links in them for nonusers for starters?? you would think it wouldn't take 4 years.....

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Same as above - if you're sharing the pages, you must trust this person, so make them a user, or make the page anonymous. (Or scrape it and send separately, bypassing your security policy)

Jason Linthwaite

Being a Confluence user, I also cannot understand how I cannot share a single page with an external user. This is such a common occurence, e.g. sharing a policy for review with a regulator, or sharing a document with a temporary team member. Being a company that uses suppliers regularly, your solution to just make the page anonymous is not satisfactory and neither is the solution to add user / remove potentially every couple of weeks, or more if the users on the supplier side is changing.

This really has to be incorporated into the product. The only reason I can see for not doing it is that it forces us (small businesses) to purchase a higher volume license and then pay more money in order to allow people access to the document.

Currently I have to recreate the document in another storage mechanism and so makes me wonder if I should actually just forget Confluence altogether and use a different system.

Many thanks.

Eugene Dementiev

We also absolutely need to be able to share a page to an external non user, at least as read only

Ross Gerring

+1 from me.

The use case for this is really simple.

My company is a digital agency. We have multiple clients, large and small. We use Confluence for the majority of our documentation on our own systems, AND for the systems/projects of our clients that we're working on.

We work collaboratively with our clients. For each client (Organisation), we'd like to create a space in Confluence, probably identified by the name of that Organisation. For each of these spaces, we'd like to grant access to one or more employees of that Organisation. Some will have read/write access, some just read access.

That's it.

Naturally we don't want to create full user accounts for all employees (that need access) for all the Organisations (100+) that we work with.

Hoping that Atlassian will come up with a smart solution one day for this.

Ross

Martin Plattner_510nq9

As others have said, why has this issue been marked as solved? It isn't.

Obviously it's a crucial feature (nowadays) to be able to quickly share one or more pages with external parties, without having to create an account for them.

Do you actually suggest that I create 10 user accounts and set permissions to share a short text of a project proposal with my client's company that has 10 employees?
Sorry to say that, but that's just impractical and unworldly.

Sad to see that Atlassian rather sees longstanding Confluence users leaving their product(s) just to make some additional license fees here and there...

Martin Plattner_510nq9

Completely agree with you.

Ross Gerring

I've previously posted that my company is a digital agency with multiple clients, and that we'd like to be able to create documentation for each of our clients, and then share it with them in a collaborative, wiki-like way.

Given that this is not viable with Confluence currently, the next best thing appears to be to encourage each of our clients (who can benefit from shared documentation) to create their own Confluence account, and then for them to add a single user account (e.g. info@...) for my company to that Confluence account.

The above solution is not ideal, mainly because it's not as collaborative as a well thought out shared solution, but it does the trick.

Feyola

I must add another +1 to this issue. Completely agree. I'm a game designer and I want to share my one-pager doc to possible investors. I can't. I must translate my confluence doc to google docs. Why I must write it in confluence in the first place? Awful...

Sheri Atwood

Adding my +1 as well. As the CEO of our company I am pushing our employees to one solution and was keen on moving out of word docs etc using Sharepoint. HOWEVER, at least with Office 365 I can post my doc on SHAREPOINT and share FOR FREE. I simply wanted to share out messaging document with our external press people who DO NOT need access to anything else nor do I want them to have access. After going thru the painful process of uploading, reformatting, etc I now realize that unless the person is INTERNAL or I PAY for yet another license and then force a press person to login (which alone is painful) or create a shared user ---that negates the purpose of security --- its useless.

In a world of more and more outsourcing and cloud solutions - Heck Atlassian wants us to "outsource" to their cloud offering we can't even share a page to anonymous users that doesn't require a login. So for that I'm moving off of Confluence and going back to Sharepoint. Office 365 today - with Sharepoint and Teams is built in to the price, much easier and one solution!

Sad as I was such a supporter!!

Stefan Traunmüller

Hi there,

we really love Atlassian products. It's easy to collaborate and get things done within one toolset which is connected. Having Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence is really nice and saves a ton of time. Most of the time you work internally and it is okay to set up users and provision them. I also understand that Atlassian is a company which needs to make money and the solution of sharing a page or space with clients and they can act as an internal user without paying anything is not an option.

Since you are promoting yourself as leaders in a digital collaborative environment and even give insights into UX and personas/customer journeys within your blog please try to understand your customers as well. Not all of us have a single product which they work on. In most cases we have different customers and even more products which we are working on. So we get in touch with a lot of people. Some stay with us for a longer period and some just for some days. Some are collaborating extensively with us, some probably just a single time. If we work together with our customers heavily it's not a problem to get them into our ecosystem. Our customers are paying their seats and they appreciate it because, they see the benefits. That's just fair.

But in some cases you only want to share a single page to get an approval or something similar. We want to collaborate with them since having a single source of truth is crucial. Building an internal Wiki and duplicating the content into word, google drive whatsoever is definitely not an option. It's decentralizing our system and generating a lot of troubles.

Since bashing at you and threatening to leave the plattform does not help you to understand what we need I will try a different approach and come up with some options:

Option A

The export functionality is sheer nightmare (even tried different export addons). If you are building complex pages with tables and different content (sections, columns...) the word and PDF exports really look crappy (sorry to say, but bad doesn't even come close;) ). It's nothing I would forward to a client. They would lose their trust in us as a digital agency. Since we are creating an HTML page - why not add a static HTML export (single page or multiple pages within a hierarchy would be supercool). No problems with styling. The customer can view the output on mobile and desktop as well.

It's not the most convenient solution since no collaboration is involved, but at least we get something out of the system which has the quality for a client handover and there is a single source of truth when editing the content. Conversation can be done on a different channel.

Option B

Even better would be an anonymous sharing functionality. So no need to export a page but just generate a simple link. No need for different users and rights permission. Anyone who has that certain link can view that page. No need to set the space to anonymous and secure all the different pages for internal eyes only (from an agency perspective that's a security issue as well. People will make mistakes and something not considered for client eyes will be revelead at any time - people make mistakes). Big advantage here is - no additional export if you update the contents of a page.

Option C

Similar to option B but with the possibility to comment on a page as well (No editing - plain comments - similar to Jira Issue collectors). No need for an E-mail, registration or whatsoever. Just put in a name (store it locally so it can be reused) and add a comment. That's it. If there is an update the agency has to take care that the customer gets informed.

Option D

Same as C but with a guest E-Mail login. It must not be connected to any kind of permission. Sharing is still done on a page level and limited to commenting but with the big advantage, that a customer is informed, when there is an update or we comment anything.

----

We would love if you consider to set one of these options worthy to set them on a future roadmap. If you have any questions feel free to drop me an E-Mail or even call me and we can discuss on different approaches, needs...

Again - we love Atlassian products - but let's make them even more awesome .

cheers

Stefan

Declan Hannon

This has not been solved so why is it marked as such?

@Caroline Bartle How is this not important functionality? As a business analyst I am required to work with many many stakeholders both within and outside of the business. The fact I cannot share specific confluence pages without sharing the whole space and restricting every page (i have hundreds) is extremely problematic. I had started looking to move my google docs over to confluence however confluence is just so sub par. You cannot do the most basic things like change your font size... (outside the predefined headings or paragraph) or share individual pages with individual contacts. I just cannot understand why such critical functionality is missing. It seems Atlassian are either to slow to match the competition (which has already surpassed confluence) or just don't care about the feedback being given. Four years some of these issues have been raised for.. I don't care what company it is, four years is an unacceptable period to not even acknowledge requirements let alone implement them.

The fact this thread has so many comments yet still gets marked as solved seems to demosntrate the total apprach taken by the Atlassian team. Cloud is no longer the future it is the present yet is being totally neglected of the most basic of cloud based requirements.

This must be a native feature that does not require paid licencing to manage.

Randy Morrow

Yea, I don't see us staying with confluence very long.

Der Lurch

We would really like to see this plugin available for Cloud instances of Confluence. We cannot use Confluence in the current state as link sharing is not possible.

Monique vdB

@Ollie Guan would the plugin you mentioned be useful for some of these folks?

Ollie Guan

Yes, I think E-Mail this Page can meet the above needs.But this plugin is only available for Confluence Server.

Declan Hannon

Unfortunately this won't help those of us who use cloud. I'm just astonished that in this day and day Confluence doesn't let you share access. This has been a basic feature of FREE google docs/slides for half a decade. Even if it were compatible with cloud we would have to email pages out individually every time an update was made. It's just a shame that Atlassian don't seem to care about their customers or make any effort to liaise directly and get their roadmap properly prioritised.

Thanks @Ollie Guan for trying to help here you've done more than Atlassian have lol

JeffreyNolte

+1 this locking of accounts is pretty frustrating. There should be a way to handle this.

Chris H

+1 This has not been resolved and it drives me crazy. I tried to share a page with existing user and still he couldn't access because he didn't had access to the space. This is terrible and creates security risk as well as management overhead. Atlassian, please resolve ASAP!!!

Larry_lef52k

Seems like other priorities are in play and what customers want doesn't really matter. I'm on about 4 or 5 other chains with flaming commentary just like this. I'm just not sure what to switch to.

A Raadls

+1 and I agree, this is borderline arrogant on Atlassian's part to have a huge "share" button that most users will associate with how that works on iOS, Google Sheets, Dropbox, etc, but in reality it's a farce and you can't. There are a lot of complaints across the web that Jira/Confluence are "90's" tools and the likes of Airtable, Gitlab, ClickUp, Notion etc. are much more tuned in, nimble, UX friendly, eager to provide gobs of features for free. It really appears that Atlassian is getting bloated and management could use a resent in Lean and Agile methodologies themselves. Like "you should provide what the customer wants" as a top priority. It is amazing this feature has taken so long, what else are they working on? The new Confluence template is horribly bug ridden and full of useless features I can't imagine users want - who wants the title of the page to be center-justified and not easily moved back to the left like most documents and Wikipedia format? That's just one example...

unknown

+1 looking for this feature

Laurens de Vries

I've received many requests for this exact piece of, in my opinion, basic functionality. Wake up Atlassian!

unknown

Congratulations, it's been 5 years since this has been brought up.

Happy Birthday guys!

Gabriel Fonseca

Why did you do a new irrelevant nextgen copy trello board and didn't do this????

Happy birthday ticket. bcb688b0842b6dc0dca5383c03b2a2bf

Mark_Schultheiss

Folks this is not going to happen given the time frame

It is obvious they do not wish to expose public pages within a paid account scope without an account
They do not wish to pay to serve public pages that are not secured by a username/account in this manner (oh wait, people pay for accounts and want to do this?)
Pay someone else for content delivery/serving, it is obvious they do not have interest in this particular feature

unknown

Update: Confluence onDemand no longer exists.

Comala does support Confluence Cloud instance.

A Raadls

Just noticed this comment @gabrielfs , tend to agree with your assessment of Next-Gen, very Trello like as one of the big pride points early on was the ability to add images in cards. How hard was that particular feature to add to the Classic Jira in the first place? Which I believe does not have it still. Really wondering how long Atlassian planned to have people in two versions of Jira. Could you imagine if there were two versions of Trello out there? Or if the likes of Asana, Basecamp etc. would ever imagine splitting users across what are in essence the old, and then updated, version of their app? Kind of like Apple leaving two iOS'es out there and asking users to choose which is better while neither is full featured.

Chris Cooke Old Street Apps

Try External Share for Confluence.

Available on Cloud, and all other platforms soon

Farid Benamrouche

Blocked as well, moving the whole company out because of this missing feature.

This will take us time to migrate the documents, what a pity.. Canfluence was getting nice, this is a so stupid limitation.

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