Can I limit access on some part of the confluence space

[Naama Lev]

Hello Experts, 

Can I limit access on some part of the confluence space?

I would like to open the space to the customer, and one part (everything under a parent page) I would like to hide, 

is that possible?

Thanks

Naama

[Rodrigo Girardi Adami · Accepted solution]

HI Naama,

I could find this answer which helps understanding the Confluence permission model for spaces.

Nic Brough has a good answer for this with a possible approach:

Confluence has a simple top-down permissive access model - you need to let him have access to the space first, then restrict him from seeing *everything* else in the space. There is a slight variation you could do - keep the page in the space, but rearrange the hierarchy so that you have two main "branches" in the space. Let's call them "public" and "private". For your case, all the pages except the one you want him to see would be in the "private" branch, and that one page would be "public". You then set the space permissions to "let everyone see it" and restrict the "private" page to "everyone except my odd user". The permission will cascade down the private branch and hide all the pages in it from him. As an aside, that probably breaks the heirarchy too, so I'd probably add the "public" page into the private branch with an "include" in the appropriate place.

Confluence default behavior is to allow all and then block someone. This is the behavior of the permissions.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Rodrigo

[Daniel Wester]

Yes - Kinda. https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Page+Restrictions

"If you restrict viewing of a page to a user or group, all children of that page are also restricted to the user or group. Edit page restrictions on the other hand, are not inherited."

[Naama Lev]

Hi Thanks for that! Can I do the other way around? restrict the whole space except one section? Thanks Naama

[Jonathan Simonoff]

Daniel -- your suggestion is exactly right, except I'm not sure why you say "kinda". The sentence you quote doesn't mean that people will be able to edit pages they can't view, If you can't view a page you can't edit it. The note about edit restrictions only applies to pages that you can view.

[Philipp Sendek]

I would always go with an approach of the style mentioned by @Rodrigo Adami (private and public "branches"), as this achieves a high awareness of the "private" group, that whatever they post in this branch is exclusively viewable by the selected audience.

While, when you just restrict a sub page that's somewhere in the hierarchy, it might not be so obvious to everyone, and worst case, someone opens up one of those pages in the tree and this also affects all of its sub-pages.

Best case this shouldn't be a problem, but being the collaboration-promoting platform that Confluence is, it could always happen that someone fiddles with the restrictions and creates a catastrophic leak.