Collaborate with anyone, anywhere with Confluence guests: GA release now live

[#1]

They say good things rarely happen in silos, but sometimes silos can be just what you need to make sure all the right people have the right access to information and that information related (and unrelated) to the project is secure. With Confluence Guests, you can turn individual spaces into secure, collaborative silos to share information and move work forward with people outside of your organization like contractors, agencies, and consultants.

📣 We are excited to announce that we have transitioned Confluence Guests from beta to a GA (general availability) experience. Confluence guests are available to all customers on our paid plans (Standard, Premium, and Enterprise).

In the GA experience, Confluence admins will still be able to add up to* 5 free guests for each paid user on their site (e.g. a Confluence site with 100 paid users, can have up to 500 free guests).

✅ A guest’s access is fully restricted to their single assigned space with no visibility into other spaces.

• Guests are added with a two-step process: First, they are added to the site by an org admin and then they must be added to a space by the product or space admin. If the second step — assigning space access — isn’t done, then the guest won’t be able to access Confluence at all.

• Each individual guest can have access to one space at a time.

• There is no limit on the number of total spaces that can be shared with guests.

• There is no limit to the number of guests that can be in one space.

*Total paid and guest users cannot exceed the current Confluence site user limit, which, as of publishing, is 50,000 users.

What’s changing: Key differences between beta and GA

Over the next few weeks, you’ll notice some minor enhancements to the experience that make it easier for guests to ramp up and subtle yet effective indicators to remind non-guest users that they are working in a shared environment with guests and to use caution when sharing information in those spaces. However, there are three significant distinctions worth noting:

1️⃣ Multi-factor Authentication policies

Admins can now enforce a more secure form of authentication for external guests through a one-time password (OTP) via email before they can access Confluence. More authentication options including SAML SSO coming soon.

2️⃣ Advanced guests space assignment tools

Adding guests remains a two-step process, but we've made the second step of the process - space assignment - even easier to manage. Now, admins have the ability to search for guests by name and email, filter guests by space or no space assigned, and bulk assign up to 25 guests at a time to a space.

3️⃣ Atlassian Access billing changes

As part of the beta program, Atlassian Access billing policies were waived for managed accounts with the Confluence Guest user role. As the Confluence Guest role is made generally available (GA), standard Access billing policies will go into effect for guests with managed accounts.

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The GA experience has just started rolling out so you can expect to see these changes on your Confluence Standard, Premium, and Enterprise sites within the next few weeks.

ℹ️ Customers on the Free edition can start a paid trial under “manage subscriptions” in the admin portal.

If you’ve previously used guests during the beta, thank you for being a part of bringing this feature to life! And if you’re new to guests, we hope you enjoy the ability to seamlessly collaborate with your external teammates. You can learn more about the feature in our support documentation.

[Nancy Hutson Hale]

Literally the news that I have been waiting for!

[Ollie Guan]

Cool!

[Marian Jurenka]

Fantastic news....this made my day!;)

[HP]

Superb this is an awaiting feature. Fantastic! 

[Thomas Wäspi]

That's great news, we are using it since beta was introduced. There is one thing we struggle from time to time: sometimes, people (our confluence guests) have different roles. f.e. they work for more than one project. f.e. they work for a community project and as well for a company. that means for us clearly 2 confluence spaces. in this case we need to onboard the same people with 2 logins, that's a bit of a pain, because they even might work on the parallel projects with us.

onboarding as a confluence user is strictly no option because of security issues having them in the confluence-users group.

any solution here?

[Manuel Niederkofler]

@Thomas Wäspi 

We created dedicated user groups for giving space access. The confluence-users group which gives the product access, for us only grants access to specific spaces which are viewable for everyone.

For specific spaces a new group is created and given access to.

So in your case, you would give those users a confluence user license with dedicated access to the required spaces (individually or via specific user group).

Hope this helps.

[Aslan Bennington-Barr]

Is it possible to convert users added as Guests to anonymous users?

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Late to the party, but we love guests in Confluence guests so much, we just had to sing about it in our latest video: https://youtu.be/cONDy0jQLrU

[Markus Rohrmeier]

@Morgan Wang @Thomas Wäspi 

We have also been using the guests since beta and find it great.

We would also definitely like to have the ability for guests to access at least two spaces.

We have one space with documentation that all of our customers can access and then each customer has their own space with special documentation just for them.

You can also vote for my suggestion:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-74797

[Quinn Souther]

Nice addition! A couple of questions:

• Can a guest view comments (whether at the bottom of the page, or inline ones)?
• Can a guest add their own inline or bottom-of-page comments, and/or participate in existing comment threads? Tag other users in comments?
• If yes to either of the above questions, are we able to control whether guests can see and/or post comments on a page?

[Alex Barnaba]

It's wonderful! thank you!!!

[Ellen Beentjes]

We tried guest users in Bèta but were not so happy since guest users in our Confluence space that were also crating tickets in our service desk do no longer have access to our knowledge bases. So beware if you also work with Jira Service Management, this will block your support users from viewing KB articles if you also add them to a regular Confluence space.

CONFCLOUD-74966

[Snorre Selmer]

This is a really nice feature for sure, but I'm wondering:

We have an organization with lots of internal documentation. We have a rather large number of internal users that needs read-only access to a single space (but we can't publish the space to the entire internet. Can we use Guests for this without them having to take up a full license? And can we use an AD-synced group to manage this?

[Javier Dieguez]

We are not so happy with the solution. We have some read-only spaces with different information from our guest (about security, development rules, use of different tools...as Confluence) and after reading them they only colaborate and write in one space (the special one for their project).

But as they access to more than one space, we can't take advantage of the "guest license". Would it be possible with the Guest licence access only to one space with write/colaborate rights but with access to other spaces only to read?

[mike]

I was excited by the email, but finding that an admin has to invite every guest seems like a bottleneck.

[Joni Graham]

Is this feature available for Data Center and Cloud?

[Michele Bazzani]

I was able to add my team members as guests to the team space to utilize the new Retro Whiteboard; half of them can see it and half can not.

They can access the space but can not find the Retro template even when clicking on the retro board, where you see the template layout, they just see an empty grid. - Any thoughts?

[Michel Aguilar]

Waiting Atlassian to fix the issue all cloud customers have when having a JSM portal + Confluence Guests uesrs

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-74966

If anyone is reading this post, take a minute and vote for this bug to be corrected/fixed

[Jeff Hoover]

Can org admins/site admins control which spaces are allowed to have guests?  Maybe a better way to ask is as an org/site admin, can I allow space admins for spaces a, b and c to add guests but prevent spaces d, e and f from being able to add guests?  Why?  To ensure guests are not accidentally added to spaces that should never be shared externally.

[Aura Hill]

If we do not have managed accounts, are guests still free? Assuming we stay within the limits of 5 guests per paid user.

[Nathan Goss]

If my organisation does not sign up to Atlassian Access, can we keep running with our Guest users currently setup?

[Christoph Wendler]

My organisation is using Atlassian Access. I tried following the steps to ensure that the guests are not in a billable policy. But when I check where the guests are located, I don't see them assigned to any authentication policy. If I want to add them to one, the system doesn't show me these users. Are they now billable or not?

[Troy Holmes]

It is unclear to me whether guest users go against the total number of licenses you have purchased. For example, if I have purchased 15 licenses and I add a guest which takes the total number of users to 16, will I get billed for that guest user just as I would for my original 15 licenses that I purchased?

[Mirka Osojca]

Same question - if I don't have any managed users in my organisation, will we get billed, or not? 

@Morgan Wang I see there is more people concerned about this update, could you please get back to us in the comments? 

[Morgan Wang]

Quick update on some of the questions above.

• Access Billing would only apply to Guests with managed accounts (i.e. accounts claimed under an organization's verified domains). Guests with unmanaged accounts will not be impacted by Access Billing.
  • The standard Access Billing policies will apply as documented here.
  • You also have the option to put Confluence Guest users in a non-billable policy. Please see this documentation if you would like to move Guests into a non-billable policy.
• Guests are free up to 5 guests per paid user and you do not need Atlassian Access to add Guests.