Introducing public links for Confluence - External sharing made simple and secure!

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community!

I’m Nidhi, Sr. Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team and I’m thrilled to announce that public links for Confluence Cloud are now officially generally available! Get ready to experience the convenience of sharing view-only Confluence pages with the internet, all through a simple link! ✨ Learn more about public links.

Who will get access to the public links?

Beginning October 2023, public links will be available to all Confluence Cloud customers on a paid plan (Standard, Premium, and Enterprise). We are releasing this in batches till the end of November. So if you do not see the feature yet, we appreciate your patience!

Confluence as the single source of truth, shareable to all!

We know that Confluence is the collaborative center for many teams. Now you can continue to keep Confluence as the centralized knowledge hub while sharing widely, unlimited by boundaries of your organization.

Use cases that would require you to share information broadly like release notes from engineering teams, press releases from marketing teams, and knowledge base articles from product teams — all of these can quickly and easily be shared with public links in Confluence!

Trust is our top priority, always 🔒

When developing public links for Confluence, we prioritized granular controls to ensure content can be shared easily but securely. This includes:

1. Granular controls at site and space level

2. Centralized and extensive auditability of public content

3. Measures to help you share widely but only when you intend to

Controls at site and space level

While we might not always need them, there’s peace of mind in knowing that there are double locks on the door. 🔐

• Product admins will have site-level control over what content can be made public. With a simple toggle, you can choose to allow or disallow public content on your site. Disabling this toggle will mean no one can create public links for any page on your site. Learn how to here.

• Once enabled by a Product admin, space admins will have control over individual spaces (& personal spaces) to allow content to be made public in that space or not. Learn how to here.

😉 Sneak peek: We will soon be adding org admin capability that will help you control what content can be made public across your organization and easily block the capability for product admins to enable it for their product instance.

Powerful ways to audit public content

1️⃣ Both, product admins and space admins will have a list of all content that is public at the tip of their fingers in a centralized location within Global Permissions and Space Permissions respectively.

• In the spaces list, which is present within Global Permissions, you can audit which space allows public content and how many pages are currently public in each space.

• In the pages list, which is present within Global Permissions and Space Permissions, you can audit which pages are currently open to anyone on the internet [see note below about measures taken to prevent search engine indexing], who enabled the public link, and when it was enabled.

Functionalities that are common across both lists:

• Search, filtering, and sorting functionalities allow you to find what you are looking for and take quick actions, easily.

• The more actions menu allows you to take actions without having to navigate elsewhere

2️⃣ Additionally, the powerful audit log equips product admins with the capabilities to go back in time and check actions related to public links like on, off, block and unblock of page, and space and site level controls.

3️⃣ Notifications for site, space, and page-level actions ensure that you stay on top when content is made public.

1. Product admins can choose to be notified when an admin allows the use of public links on their site and when a public link is created for individual pages

2. Space admins can choose to be notified when an admin allows the use of public links on their space and when a public link is created for individual pages

You can turn these notifications off in your Settings any time you want!

We want you to share widely but only when you intend to

• Indicators throughout the experience clearly show when a page is public. Look out for the 🌎 globe icon on the Share dialog, whether you are in Edit mode or View mode of a page.

• Confirmation dialogs ensure users and admins are fully aware and intentional in making content accessible via this unique URL.

• Public links for pages will not be turned on automatically. Just because public links are enabled at the site level, doesn’t mean individual page links will be created automatically. Only a user action directly on a specific page to turn the public link on can make the public link on.

🏆 Powerful capabilities for our Premium and Enterprise customers

For Premium and Enterprise customers, we have built you some powerful capabilities to increase your efficiency and peace of mind!

• Bulk actions: Take actions on up to 25 spaces or pages at a time to perform any action on them like turn on, off, block or unblock all from the central admin locations

• Pre-emptive blocking: Product admins can pre-emptively create a denylist of spaces that will be blocked from allowing public content, even before you turn on site-wide public links. This will ensure peace of mind and confidence that when you allow public links on your site, only the spaces that you have reviewed will be allowed to have public content.

Other things to note:

Atlassian has taken all necessary steps in its capability to make sure search engines do not index Confluence public links. For instance, a Confluence public page would not show up in a Google search result.

• If your site was created before October 16, 2023, you’ll need to take action to allow public links on your site (Go to Site settings > Global permissions > Public links.)

• If your site was created or migrated to Cloud after October 16, 2023, public links will be allowed to be created on your site by default. You can easily turn off this capability with a single click

• When allowed at the site level, all existing and new spaces will allow public links by default unless an admin specifically disallows it at the space level. Product admins can use the Default Space Permissions to set the default of their choice for any new space that is created.

• Apps and content from macros will not be rendered on the public pages and apps will not be notified of page visits by external visitors.

• 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!

• The public link URL remains the same even if you toggle the public link off and on. To create a new public link, create a copy of the page and turn on public link for the new page.

• Changes to the share dialog: If a page is in a space or site that doesn’t allow public links, the public link option will appear greyed out, turned off, and disabled.

We are excited for you to expand the bounds of your team collaboration with easy link sharing, with all the right measures to keep your content secure!

Happy sharing!

[Svenja Lorenzen]

Can't wait for this feature to roll out! This is great! 

☑️ Having a style guide that you want to share with the design agency - share your corporate design page.

☑️ Worked out a roadmap to present to the customer - share the project roadmap page.

☑️ Want to put out a newsletter for your followers - share the newsletter page.

I'm very excited!

Quick question at the end: Will it be possible to put a time limit to active link? For example 4 weeks, and after that the link becomes outdated?

[Mélanie Liguet]

Hi @Nidhi Raj 

does the public link become inactive after a while?
The goal is to control the data that we distribute. a deadline for the validity of the public link would guarantee the security of the information disseminated

regards,

[Marco Brundel]

Hi @Nidhi Raj ,

Is app content, such as Gliffy or DrawIO, also available?

Regards, Marco Brundel

[Nidhi Raj]

Awesome to see the excitement!

@Svenja Lorenzen @Mélanie Liguet During this release, there won't be an option to set an expiry for the links, however that is on our roadmap as an enhancement we would like to build for this in the future.

@Marco Brundel Great question, any content that is not directly on the page and is not public will not be visible on the public page. This means content from macros or apps, links to other Confluence pages that aren't public, Jira reports etc. that are not public will not be rendered on the public page.

[Tom_Carrott_Adaptavist]

Hey @Nidhi Raj

I'm trying to test this out but i'm not seeing external links option under global permissions on my site settings. The plan i'm on is standard. 

Is this feature not fully rolled out to all users yet?

Many thanks,

Tom

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

@Nidhi Rajgreat news! One question though - I can see that, when enabled, public links are available on pages but not on blogs as well. Are public links for blogs not supported at this time?

[Nidhi Raj]

@Tom_Carrott_Adaptavist Correct, we've begun the rollout of the feature. We expect for most customers to have it by end of October. Those customers who have opted in to our release tracks will get the feature by end of the year.

@Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ Correct, public links are only available for pages currently.

[Jenny Huynh]

For public links, can there be a future option where specific pages are password-protected? I am interested in sharing content with colleagues across campus, but am not exactly comfortable with sharing this outside of my organization. 

[Mélanie Liguet]

Hey @Nidhi Raj,

will this be deployed on our sandbox as well?
we have it in production but not on the sandbox yet.
just wait?

[Thiago Schmid]

@Nidhi Raj , thank you very much for sharing this.

Do you know if:

1. We will be able to password-protect those pages? This is very important to us as our teams need to share onboarding pages with people who don't have an Atlassian account, those pages sometimes contain sensitive information that should not be available on the web to everyone with just the link.
2. Are those public pages searchable on the web? Can we turn this option on/off?
3. Can we have an expiration date for the public link?

Thank you very much!

[Nidhi Raj]

Hi @Thiago Schmid

Thank you for your questions.

No to all three :) 1 & 3 are functionalities we are considering building after we complete rollout of this release. 2 - as mentioned in above blog, they aren't searchable on the web. There won't be an optioned to turn on/off, this is another functionality we hope to build in the future.

Excited for all the use cases you will use this feature for!

[Drew]

Can the banners be hidden?

[Lukas Gotter _ Meetical]

Great feature! 

@Nidhi Raj two questions:

a) Will it be possible to create new public links or get existing links via the REST API? 

b) Are there any plans to support 3rd party macros? Such as Drawio or the Meetical macros (to share meeting agendas with external people). 

Kind regards, Lukas

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

I have a love - hate with this feature. Love as making a page public in 2 clicks (ie anyone with URL can view page) is user friendly and needed.

… but unusable. All or nothing permissions. I can’t limit by space, more importantly by user group.

I know a lot about Confluence permission as we built something unique for our app Space Content Manager. It is a 'super app' in that it has numbers features (find and replace, link manager...). We give admins the option to not only enable/disable any feature but also to limit any feature by space, group or user.

Some tools need to be restricted, the larger point is that we empower admins who have to deal with at times complex internal requirements.

I do not want all my users to have access to public links. So now I can't use a feature that I have been waiting for :(

[Andreas Schmidt _yasoon_]

@Nidhi Raj 

Want to second Drews comment.

We have Confluence premium and having 2 marketing banners for Confluence at the top and bottom without option to disable does not give a proffessional look to our clients and prevents us from using the feature.

We better share with Sharepoint

[Maximilian Floß]

Hi @Nidhi Raj 

can  the Confirmation dialogs be customized?

[Johnson]

Hello @Nidhi Raj

Thanks for the update, could you please more specify about the public links and disallows customize?

Can you describe the changes in the share dialog when a space or site disallows public links?

[Rob B]

@Nidhi Raj Is there a plan to allow macros to be rendered on public links? We use a couple apps for documents we like to share publicly so them being blocked is not ideal. Hopefully this capability is in the product roadmap for this feature.

[Nathan Waters - AppsPlus]

When a user creates a "public link" you really need a clear disclaimer stating that apps and macros will not be rendered at all.

I have customer support tickets on a weekly basis complaining that our apps are not rendered in these public links. They blame us, when the blame is squarely on Atlassian.

[Lê Hoài]

It should have been earlier! Thanks Atlassian

[Øyvind Korneliussen]

Can the banners be hidden?

[Tiffany Chung]

Hi @Drew @Øyvind Korneliussen  banners cannot be hidden on a public link. 

[Tiffany Chung]

Hi @Johnson you can learn more about what renders on a public link on the support documentation here

If a space or site disallows public links, it will have a disabled state such that a user cannot toggle the public link on for a page.

[Tiffany Chung]

Hi @Nathan Waters @Rob B thank you for your feedback! Are there specific features, macros or apps that your teams are looking to render on a public link?

[Tiffany Chung]

Hi @Lukas Gotter _ Meetical thanks for your questions! 

a) Will it be possible to create new public links or get existing links via the REST API? 

Not yet.

b) Are there any plans to support 3rd party macros? Such as Drawio or the Meetical macros (to share meeting agendas with external people). 

We're making efforts to identify the top macros on a case-by-case basis to ensure they render on public links without posing any security risks.