How to grant access to a specific page(s) without granting access to anything else

Stefan Götz April 11, 2018

Hi. 

We are working with an external collaborator and what him to see and work on some specific pages we created in some general spaces (e.g. sales, marketing, etc.). 

I want to expose only a specific page, not the whole space which already contains a lot of pages. 

What we did is:

  1. register the user
  2. create and added to the group "externals"
  3. removed him from the group "confluence user"
  4. assign under page restrictions access to this specific person

This does not work. But if I leave him in the group "confluence user" he can see everything which is already created.

Is there a way to hide everything from a specific group or users and only grant permissions to a specific page? 

Thank you. 

S.

 

6 answers

7 votes
AnnWorley
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2018

Please try these steps:

  1. Create the user account
  2. Add it to the group "externals"
  3. Remove user from the group "confluence-users" (or whichever group you use to grant Use Confluence global permission)
  4. Grant Use Confluence global permission to "externals" group
  5. Grant appropriate space permissions to "externals" group
  6. Add to page restrictions if desired

For reference, please review:

I hope the steps work as expected, please let me know any obstacles you run into.

Hanif Rajabali February 21, 2023

Has there been any update to this?  I'm in this predicament myself.  I don't want to grant full space permissions and then selectively disable access to pages - that will be a maintenance nightmare!

This seems like such an intuitive feature or have I not understood?

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Capkan.Deniz February 28, 2023

Hi,

 

fully agree with @Hanif Rajabali

Any updates on this / how can we explicetly grant access to pages only?

 

Best regards,

Deniz

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Jonathan Belanger March 5, 2023

Another +1 here. The feature to enable access to only a handful of pages to a user or user group is either impossible or is not discoverable.

 

Any support here would be appreciated.

 

EDIT: "External sharing" doesn't quite fit the bill because we want to be able to include comments. I understand why comments are by default not part of an external share, but I should be able to control that setting. That would suffice for our needs.

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Michael Klaja June 2, 2023

+1 

I do have identical requirement. Granting permissions to a specific page without granting top level access edit the entire space shouldn't be rocket science...

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Vinzenz Bruckert June 26, 2023

Adding myself to +1's here. Been digging for hours now, but can't seem to figure out how to do this unless I start restricting all pages one by one so that specific users cannot see all other pages. Way too complicated. 

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3 votes
sk1030mag January 16, 2023

Only 128 votes so far...

0 votes
Ian Skerrett
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March 12, 2024

Please add this feature.

 

0 votes
Sebastian June 7, 2023

I was able to work this around using this add-on. I had to spend quite some time to set permissions for parent pages, but at least it solved my issue partially: Permission Inheritance Add-on 

0 votes
Ulf Hermann May 9, 2023

I am in the same situation. We need this feature too. Please add this to your agenda!

0 votes
Stefan Götz April 12, 2018

Hi Ann, 

Thank you for the answer. 

I followed the steps. I checked and do have the "external" group added to the Use Confluence global permission. 

I'm not sure if I understand point 5 so. 

You say: Grant appropriate space permissions to "externals" group.

But this is exactly what I want to avoid. I want to let users, belonging to the group externals (which have global confluence permissions), to see just some pages of a space not the whole space. And I also do not want to have to restrict all other pages for all other external users. I guess I miss something. 

I hope I explained well and you can clarify or help further. 

Best

S. 

Pavel Potcheptsov
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April 12, 2018

This is not possible with current permissions model in Confluence.

You have to grant to specific user "View pages" in space permissions and restrict all pages in this space by including those who need access except specific user. And leave page for that user unrestricted.

Nick February 8, 2022

So from what I've gathered, as of today there is still no way to elevate or override the top-down permission of a single page. So if I want the user to contribute to a certain document I have to grant them editing access to the entire space, correct?

If that's the case can someone from Atlassian help me understand the sense to this architectural approach? What really is the point of page level management, by the time you get to it you've already restricted your user's abilities. The expectation is that I grant users access to the entire space and then I must manage every page individually to limit the access I want throughout?

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Marcelo February 11, 2022

Also needing this specific permission. Want to give access to anonymous user but only to one page, not the entire space. 

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Andrea Jacobson February 15, 2022

I want to be able to do this same thing.

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Simon Huprich February 20, 2022

Me Too!

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jeroentja March 3, 2022

We also! Please fix this.

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brock March 3, 2022

We also need this.

As a suggestion, maybe Atlassian should just remove "restrictions" altogether  - since as it is currently implemented, it is nearly pointless. Maybe that would get us closer to a solution some day?

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Henry Chad Apale March 21, 2022

Agreed, please implement specific page access instead of granting to a whole space and then applying restrictions to all the pages. This can be cumbersome if the Space already has multiple pages

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Scott April 5, 2022

I agree. It is painfully cumbersome to restrict access.  

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Marco De Santis April 21, 2022

If you want the chance of something happening on this topic, you need to make sure a bug or feature suggestion ticket for the according Confluence product exists.

https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=10440

Ideally add a comment to this thread indicating the respective ticket ID.

Like Sandra Hinthorn likes this
jeroentja April 21, 2022

Hi Marco, is there already a request? It's quite overwhelming al the options at the link you posted.

Honestly, I think this is a design flaw and should be reported as a bug.

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Marco De Santis April 21, 2022

Hi @jeroentja . I have not checked. I just stumbled upon this thread and wanted to share my experience. Reporting a bug or requesting a new feature in the community section is usually not going to be picked-up by Atlassian (there might be exceptions, of course).

Like Sandra Hinthorn likes this
Scott April 21, 2022

I didn't find a similar issue so I created one https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-11299 Please vote!

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Alex Rada April 29, 2022

also looking for this feature for ages.

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Deepan August 16, 2022

We too..

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Kari September 6, 2022

We too... and I agree with jeroentja it seem to be BUG 

Like Taras Korolov likes this
Myles November 29, 2022

Add me to the list as well.The lack of this functionality is painful.

Thanks

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Richard Appleton March 7, 2023

Hi all, just requiring this functionality now myself, is this still not possible at this time?

Thanks a lot. 

Gerhard Lehmann April 11, 2023

and we need this feature too. Please add this to your agenda!

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Martin Köhler April 12, 2023

Yes this is a nightmare - pls fix it

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Gabor Mayer August 2, 2023

+1

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Helgi Hvannastein
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January 5, 2024

+1

Marten Vill
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January 8, 2024

Me too! We have several external partners and we want to share very specific single pages with them from our general internal documentation. For example some specific API service details, some business requirements etc. We do not want to move these pages so some other spaces or other chemistry only because of this - it would ruin the structure and create a mess.

Josef Micka January 8, 2024

I was just looking for this myself.

Seems it's impossible to add user access to single page in space, that he has no access.

ACL is something that every modern documentation system has.

Correct ACL implementation must have both, allow list, and deny list on every single item. Confluence only has toplevel (or spacelevels) allow list, which you can't override.

Chelsea Grindstaff January 18, 2024

Please add this feature. Adding a user to an entire space, then having to hide them from every single page except for one is not feasible. 

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