Default Permissions for New Group

[Alex Sramek]

We're planning on adding several new groups to our Confluence instance.

Is there any way to set what this group's default permission settings will be in various existing spaces?

I know how to set up what their permissions will be in a NEW space, but what permissions do they get in spaces that already exist?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Alex Sramek 

New groups will not have any permissions in existing spaces.

There is no native functionality in the Confluence Cloud UI to add new groups to multiple individual Space Permissions settings in one action. You have to go to each space and modify the permissions settings in that space to include the new groups.

You could leverage the API to programmatically add groups to space permissions.

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/v1/api-group-space-permissions/

[Alex Sramek]

Got it, thanks!

This won't break any paradigms on my end, which is good news.

It actually kinda sounds like a preferable situation. Is there any way to remove groups from the "Default Space Permissions" list, so that spaces only manage permissions of groups relevant to them?

[Trudy Claspill]

Yes.

Click the gear icon near your avatar.

Find Space Permissions in the navigation bar on the left. It should be directly under Global Permissions.

Click the Edit Permissions button.

In the grouping at the top of the page where default space permissions are defined uncheck all the options for any group that you don't want to have permissions by default in newly created spaces going forward.

Save the changes.

This has no impact to spaces that already exist. For pre-existing spaces the permissions have to be removed from the individual spaces.

[Alex Sramek]

Ahhh, OK, I had misunderstood the paradigm a bit before, think I get it now.

So all spaces have permissions listings for all groups, and when a new group comes along, it'll be populated among all the spaces, just with all the boxes unchecked.

(I had guessed the space just might not have entries at all for the new groups)

Thanks for getting me up to speed!

[Trudy Claspill]

Not quite.

In the Permissions pages in the grid showing allocated permissions you will see only the groups who have explicitly been granted permissions in that space. If a group has not been granted permissions explicitly to that space, you won't see it in the grid.

When a new space is created, the groups in the Default Space Permissions page/grid will automatically be granted those explicit permissions in that space. That happens only when a space is newly created. If you later change the permissions/groups in the Default Space Permissions page that has no impact on existing Spaces. It will only impact new spaces that are created in the future.

If you want to modify permissions for an existing space, you can Edit the permissions for that individual space. When you are in Edit mode you can make changes to the permissions already allocated (adding/removing permissions) shown in the grid, and you can search for other groups to whom you want to now grant explicit permissions to the space. If you uncheck all the options for a group you see in that grid, then that group no longer has permissions to that space and that group will no longer be shown in the grid, after you save the changes.

All groups that are known to the site (as found in https://admin.atlassian.com under the site/product Groups page) are accessible to be added to the Permissions grids. If you add a new group to the site, you won't see that group explicitly listed in the Permissions grids, but you can edit the permissions and add them to the grid by granting one or more permissions.

Note that granting Space permissions to a group is not the same thing as granting Confluence access to all the users in that group. A user still must be granted Product Access. If there is a user in the group that does not have Product Access for Confluence, then they will not be able to access Confluence content regardless of a group to which they belong having permissions to a specific Space.