How to temporarily share documents externally in confluence

Question

We have customers who collaborate on our requirements documents. I would really like for them to be able to directly review, annotate, etc. in confluence, but I cant give them access to the entire project space (it has hundreds of documents that I do not want to individually rights-manage).  I thought about creating a separate space for external viewing, but now my requirements documents would be stored apart from the rest of my project documentation and I cant find any way enable a search across two sites.  Am I missing an obvious answer here.  I am going to be forced to send it to them as a word document and proxy their red-line updates. Not happy! Please tell me I am missing something!

Rodney Hughes · Answer

Only to add that you don't have to create a new "confluence customers" group - each customer just has to have their own Username

Set up two pages - one with Restricted Viewing to your team (by name or group) and giving it an "obvious" page title such as "Info (team restricted)" - that is important so there is a visual identifier to the team where they are posing things.

The other page is titled also something obvious as "info (unrestricted)"

If you have two different customer groups then you can create multiple pages as
"info (cust 1 restricted)" with only your team and that customer #1 as the View restriction
"info (cust 2 restricted)" with only your team and that customer #2 as the View restriction

Note that View restrictions are inherited but Edit are not - but that is OK since to Edit you must be able to View

Andrea Carl_fjmjbu · Answer

Here's what I would do:

Create a new group in Confluence, i.e. "confluence-customers,"  Assign these users to confluence-customers, but not confluence-users (make sure they have login permissions)

Provide access for this group at the space level for that particular space.

Move all the pages that you do not want this group to view under a page.  Restrict this page so that only, confluence-users, can view and edit.

When you restrict a page, the subpages inherit the restrictions.