Roll out the welcome mat — guests are available in Confluence Cloud

[#1]

6/29/23 update: Guests are now generally available. Get the latest details here.

📣 We’re so excited to announce that the single-space guest beta is now available in all paid Confluence Cloud editions: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise.

Take your team's productivity to the next level by making spaces collaboration hubs for both internal and external team members. We know your contractors, partners, and vendors are part of the team that makes work happen, and now they can actually feel like it.

See our support articles for details on what guests can and can’t do within Confluence. In short, Guests can only see and collaborate on content within their designated space or spaces that are open by other means and features like Anonymous Access. They will not see the people directory like a regular user and cannot change permissions within a space. They can, however, create pages, comment, and edit content within that space (with admins retaining full control over those permissions, of course). Guests can also be managed like other regular users easily via the product settings.

Visual guest markers make it easy for internal users to know when they are working with external teammates.

See our support articles for more details on how to get set up within Confluence, but here’s the short version:

For each paid user on a Confluence site, Admins will be able to add up to 5 guests for no additional cost or licenses. Total paid + guest user count cannot exceed the current Confluence site user limit, which, as of publishing, is 35,000 users.

Each guest can only access one space at a time.
	But you can have guests in as many spaces as you’d like.
And, you can have multiple guests in a single space.

Frequently Asked Questions

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How will this work for companies that have integrated Confluence with an Identity Provider (Okta, OneLogin, etc.)? Will Guests be able to access Confluence Spaces if they do not have IdP account?

The same process will exist for Guest role as they do for normal user roles when it comes to IdPs. The IdP will sync a group of users into admin.atlassian.com. The Org admin will go into the group and apply the Confluence Guest role to that group. Any future user sync into that group will grant them the new users a Confluence Guest role. Customers with an IdP can currently grant product access manually to any users inside or outside their IdP (e.g. via a manual invite). The same is true for the Confluence Guest role.

How does this feature work for the users connecting via SSO?

SSO can be applied to any Atlassian Account that has been domain claimed. We only allow users with an Atlassian Account to get access to Confluence via the Guest role. So if they have users on SSO today in JSM, then those same users can get access to Confluence via the Guest role, and also have SSO applied to them. However, just having SSO on JSM clients does not automatically apply to Confluence.

Do guest users have access to individual Spaces despite IP allowlisting?
Guests don't circumvent IP allowlisting, so they have to originate from an allowed IP.

Is there a way to disable this when it rolls out? or is it telling the org admins not to invite people?

While you can’t disable the functionality, only org admins can add a guest. Your org admins can choose not to add any guests to the site.  

How do guests and marketplace app access work?

Guests can use marketplace apps for free, however, we are providing app developers with the ability to opt out of providing guests access to their app. They can also request the installation of new apps. They cannot install new apps by themselves.
Note: Customers are responsible for the information that is stored within the marketplace apps and the access of this information.

Will adding a guest user be recorded within the audit logs?
Yes, in the audit log within Atlassian Admin you will see when guests are added and removed from the site, who added them, and the time they were added. The Confluence product audit log within the Confluence settings > Administration section will also show when a new user has been added into the default guest group and which space they were granted access to.

And don’t forget this is a beta* experience and we want to hear from you. We’ve made it easy to share feedback directly in Confluence, so don’t be shy! Add your guests and let us know what you think!

Happy Teamworking 🥳

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*Use of Confluence External Collaboration is a Beta Version subject to Section 14 of the Cloud Terms of Service.

[Sam Nadarajan]

AHHHH this is great! Do guests consume a license?

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Nice feature!!

@Sam Nadarajan it states above:

For each paid user on a Confluence site, Admins will be able to add up to 5 guests for no additional cost or licenses. 

[Sam Nadarajan]

Ope this is why I shouldn't read things too late at night xD

[Ulrich Kuhnhardt _IzymesCo_]

We love this feature! I tried it out yesterday. Experienced once small glitch- after adding space for a user in the table contents weren't updated. I had to refresh the page.

[Matthew Grimsey]

Can you convert a paid user to a guest user?

[clotilde.pamiseux@fr.clara.net]

Hi, do you have documents about the billing details including this nice offer of " For each paid user on a Confluence site, Admins will be able to add up to 5 guests for no additional cost or licenses. " 

Thanks! Clotilde

[Cristian Zuccalá]

Hello, the truth is that for the problem of what space a guest can see, it is not solved with this!
since by sending an invitation to a guest, he can access all the spaces, enabled with anonymous, the best thing would be to validate the guest and give permissions to specific spaces! does that solution exist?
attentive.
Zuka.

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

@Matthew Grimsey  you don't "convert" a guest user to a paid user. You simply grant him a license and remove the "guest" permission. It's very simple!

[Matthew Grimsey]

What if you have a pre-existing paid-user but you want to convert them to a guest user as a way to reclaim a licence?

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

@Matthew Grimsey although I'm not with Atlassian I would assume that this would be fairly easy again. You remove the license and grant him the guest role (having in mind all restrictions mentioned in this article and/or on future documentation).

[wolfgang.purrer]

@Nidhi Raj  in principal a good feature, but limiting to one space - really prevents to use it.

When you have the requirement to authenticate all users through IDP, but also the requirements to have multiple space which "public" information (each team provides product info related to their product to everyone ...)  - would be good to have read only (IDP) access to multiple spaces.. 

[Adam Stępień]

Is there any information as when there is going to be the possibility to add the whole GROUP to the guest access to the Space? From my perspective, it's a must; for enterprise class instances, guest access should be the default one to dedicated space (therefore, you can add a single group to the single space), but if the users are in need of more features, they should be granted licenses individually. ;)

[Addison Rich]

This feature applies perfectly for a use case of one of my clients. @Nidhi Raj as this appears to still be a beta feature, how safe would it be to use in terms of the feature being cancelled or deprecated? Is there a roadmap for the feature as a full release?

It's not too risky as they could fall back to using the classic groups method of limiting access to specific spaces, but would rather not configure this stuff twice.

[Dave Jennings]

@Alex Koxaras _Relational_, when you say "remove the license" how do you do that exactly? Would I have to remove the user completely then re-invite them as a guest?

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

@Dave Jennings no, you don't have to do that. Remove license = remove the user from the groups that grant him product access. Therefore he/she will not be able to use the product. And then you grant him/her the guest role.

[SendGroupSMS]

I think user need more features you should  be granted licenses and remove the guest permission 

[Ákos Botos]

Hi, @Nidhi Raj 

Is there a way to

1. Add user groups as guests to Confluence spaces?
2. Give existing user group Confluence guest access?

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,

Ákos

[Fabio Genovese]

Good morning

Some of my customers are reporting to me that Atlassian has decided to make Confluence Guest users PAYING. Can you confirm this news?

I personally think this is a very bad decision as many companies have been waiting for this option for a long time and to promise it to them and then steal it from them like this doesn't seem very nice.

Let me know. Thanks

Best

FABIO

[clotilde.pamiseux@fr.clara.net]

Good morning, same as Fabio and certainly others customers, what a very bad news this morning to see that we will have to pay the guest feature. I mean the access for the guest feature, well it is not clear could you right clearly informations please ? 

In our company we worked a lot around this feature for our customers (knowing but hoping you will not made it paid) so we still need to have more and CLEARLY informations about this feature and it evolution. 

Please keep us in touch.

Clotilde 

[Hailin.Zhang]

Good to have Confluence guests for free.