Changes to public links in Confluence Cloud coming soon (Action required)

[#1]

Hi Atlassian community members!

---

Public links are now generally available in Confluence Cloud to all paid plans! Read the official announcement here!

---

I’m Nidhi, Sr. Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team and I’m super excited to announce some changes we’re making to public links in Confluence. Public links allow you to share a view-only version of a page to anyone on the internet who has the public link. (Note: Public links are currently only available to a small percentage of customers but we hope to roll this out to all of our paid Customers later this year!)

Here's how you turn on a public link for a page:

Here's what the public sees:

What’s changing

Starting in September 2023, we're giving admins more control over where in their Confluence site public links should be available for use, while simultaneously making it less of a hassle for people to share their work successfully.

Specifically, these changes include:

• Public links and page restrictions
  View restrictions on a page or any of its parent pages won’t block people from accessing the public link anymore. Public links will just simply work!

  • [ACTION REQUIRED] We recommend checking for any pages that have the public link toggle switched on that are relying on the page’s view restrictions (including any restrictions inherited from a parent page) to prevent that public link from being accessed. Once the change hits your experience, people will be able to access those public links again. To prevent this, you’ll need to manually turn off the page's public link toggle.

• Space-level control
  You asked and we delivered! Now admins have greater flexibility in deciding in which spaces people should be allowed to use public links. Simply go to the “Public links” tab in Space permissions to control this.

• Helpful confirmation messages
  Sharing content publicly shouldn’t be done lightly. Confluence will help make sure you understand what you’re doing with public links at important points in your experience with them. You can be sure that when a change is made, it was made intentionally.

• Clear visual cues and messaging for when content is public
  With a feature like public links, information security is our #1 goal. So we’ve added indicators throughout the editing, sharing, restricting, and viewing experiences to clearly signal when content is public so you and your team are fully aware when you’re working on something public.

• Control whether new spaces should allow public links or not
  Admins can choose what the default setting should be for all new spaces created in the future and whether or not those spaces should be pre-set to allow people to use public links.

We’ve been hard at work, and even with all of that, we’re not done making it awesome!

Coming in October, we’ll be releasing even more improvements that target better admin visibility into where public links are allowed and used with an admin dashboard for both space and product admins. We’ll also be equipping our Premium customers with powerful bulk actions. Lastly, we’ll be improving how people are notified on public link actions, for further transparency!

If public links aren’t available to you, don’t fret! Soon after the October changes are released, we hope to make this feature available to all our paid Confluence Cloud customers! 🥳

We understand how important it is to keep your information safe and secure, and we hope that these changes make it easier for you to collaborate with anyone, with confidence!

Happy sharing!

[G subramanyam]

Thank you @Nidhi Raj I'm liking these feature additions.

[Caleb Winningham]

Really excited for this! Can't wait till it rolls out! 🔥🔥🔥

[Andy Gladstone]

Great improvements. I'd still like an admin dashboard of all public links from a site so they can more easily be monitored than just searching and finding them. I'd also like the Beacon team to add a detection into this to alert admins when too many public links are being created or accessed during a specific interval of time.

[TP061997@mail.apu.edu.my]

Our university is thinking of ways to avoid students from using https://chat.openai.com for their assignment. Any ideas? 🤔💡💡

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

The space-level control for public links is a much-needed feature. Glad to see it being introduced 🙌

[Dan Tombs]

I'm looking forward to seeing more around this feature. I think being able to share our work externally easier will be great.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Thanks @Nidhi Raj,

I think there will be a lot more happy admins out there and informed users! :)

We made a short video about this if anyone wants to share with a teammate: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ms3PU5HGyDs

[mybucket2018]

This feature would be welcomed but our security department will loose their mind when they find out confidential pages can be shared publicly. You can't always trust page authors.

Please tell me that we can switch this feature off or that there will be a feature so that if someone wants to share a page, it needs to be approved first?

For security and compliance, we would need:

A global report which can be accessed from the admin console of all the pages which are pending public share and what is currently being shared.

This includes a link to the page, who public shared the page, date the page was shared, the approver and a count of page views.

An option so that we can cancel the public sharing at any point.

Also will the audit log show who publicly shared their page in case of a data breach?

[Nidhi Raj]

Thank you all for engaging here! Great speaking with you last week, Andy!

@mybucket2018 - for the October release we will not have a request/approval flow,but thank you for sharing your thoughts. I have added this to our backlog.

Also will the audit log show who publicly shared their page

Yes! Admins will easily be able to see who turned on, when and what page

[mybucket2018]

@Nidhi Raj  - Thank you for getting back. Unfortunately this is not my thoughts. Giving page authors the power to publicly share links without any review by security or a document controller is a high security risk for any company. Leak of company data is a recipe for disaster which can cause irreversible damage. I know these are extreme cases but they do happen, and I hope Atlassian has thought about all this before rolling this feature out. I'm hoping we get to at least switch this feature off until improvements have been made? 

[achadfield]

Hi everyone, is there a way of getting one public page for free customers? Would say as a promotion item? 🤔 

Thanks

[Nidhi Raj]

Public links are now generally available in Confluence Cloud to all paid plans! Read the official announcement here!