How to setup confluence spaces for customers?

[MRJ]

Im trying to setup our confluence to be accessable for our customers.

This should be the default:

1. customers can log in and land on the dashboard
2. customers can manage their personal page
3. on the dashboard customers see what spaces / calendars they have access to
4. Clicking on a space they only see the homepage link that they have permission to
5. All pages are on creation default off limits to customers except for when a page is ACTIVLY set on OPEN

I've trying to get this to work, but it seems the default is; all is open and manually restrict if needed.

I'm looking for the best solution that works the other way around. (unrestrict instead of restrict)

All tips are welcome :-)

[Matthew Cobby · Accepted solution]

There is one way you can set the (non-personal) spaces up so that you don't have to keep locking down every page. It's based on using two page tree structures in a space, not the usual one.

In a normal space, there is one top level home page and every page is under that.

There is no reason why you can't have multiple page tree structures in a space and set different permissions on each. Every new page in one of the page trees automatically inherits the restrictions.

In your instance, I would setup the "public" customer pages under the space home page.

Create a new "Private Home Page" for internal use and set the restrictions at the top level. This acn stay under the space home page or be moved to the top level by going to Browse Space > pages > tree view

SPACE
       |
       +---Public home page---+ Customer 1
       |                      |
       |                      + Customer 2
       |
       +--- private home---+ private page 1
                           |
                           + private page 2

Agreed it's not perfect but it's working with what Confluence gives us.

[MRJ]

Thnx for the tip Matthew! Before going for your approach i'm thinking about exploring the following:

Would it be possible to "dirty hack" confluence so pages have default view restriction for the confluence-user group

Any thoughts on this are welcome :-)

[Eirik Midttun]

Make a separate group for customers and restrict their Global Permission to Can Use. The customer user accounts should be member of this customer group, and not any of the in house group. You can alse create customer company groups for convenience. The give access to spaces use the space permissions.

Customers cannot have a personal space without seeing all personal spaces as far as I know.

[MRJ]

Hey Eirik,

Thanks for your answer. I have already set this up the way you describe. My issue is that when i give a customer group access to a space, all pages become accessable and i have to manually restrict all pages in the space and with every newly created page make sure the permissions are set to restrict.

Any thoughts to turn this around (without creating a seperate "customer space")?

[Eirik Midttun]

That is correct, I don't think there is a way around. having a customer space is not such a bad idea though. In my company the customer/internal division is at space level.