Share confluence page to non user

[AnnWorley]

There is a suggestion ticket open, requesting the ability to share pages as you are describing: Ability to share a page to an anonymous user with a private URL

Since the suggestion is on our public-facing bug tracker you can add comments and vote, to communicate directly with the development team responsible for adding features.

[Ashleigh Brennan]

These bugs were created over 3 years ago, and the latest comment, which isn't even from the dev team, is from over 2 months ago. This is simply not at all helpful - just redirecting the problem to someone else. When can we expect to actually see any work happening on this feature? I am amazed that this ticket can be untouched for YEARS, while we were given an entirely new UI experience recently that absolutely nobody asked for. Maybe refocus the dev efforts to something actually helpful?

[Ashleigh Brennan]

There isn't even a way to vote on the Cloud version of the issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999

The link @AnnWorley has above is for the server version.

[David Voráček]

+1

[Daniel Miller]

+1 for this feature on the Server version of Confluence. We do litigation support; the research team typically dives into a large data source and creates many Confluence pages of analysis. Due to the confidential nature of the data we must continue to use the Server version. Typically, we retain a testifying expert to review a selected subset of the data. This person could be an internal, licensed Atlassian user, or an external consultant. It is critically important that this person only sees certain pages.

Fiddling with the permissions of dozens (in some cases hundreds) of pages to make this happen is a non-starter. Our current solution is to have only a few top-level pages, restricted to the research team, and a single "shared with expert" page, shared with the team plus the expert, under which we move the selected pages. The drawback is that we have to pull pages out of the research team's page hierarchy, leading to confusion about where a particular page is located.

We'd very much like to be able to add permissions on a per-page basis, and also have a dashboard that conveniently shows the hierarchy of pages and their permissions (as opposed to having to navigate to every individual page to view their permissions). Sounds like a lot of others would like this feature as well.

[Chris Cooke Old Street Apps]

Hi Daniel,

External Share for Confluence is now available on Server and Data Center. It should help you with everything you need.

Thanks!
Chris

[Jeffry Gamba]

Yes, you can! Share the Confluence Page URL to the person. But, before that, you have to enable first the anonymous access permission in the Global Permission settings.  

I tried it before answering your question because I'm also curious. It worked.

See this link :: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/confluence-evaluator-resources/confluence-can-i-share-confluence-files-to-a-non-confluence-user

[Chris H]

Hi Jeff,

This defeats the purpose of having security controls and data confidentiality. With anonymous access on... anyone can view the pages, there is no need for special feature to send an email with a link...

[Jeffry Gamba]

Hello Chris,

I know that is why we don't let that enabled. I'm just answering the query above bec I am also curious. Thanks, btw.

Jheff ;)

[Joachim Jonkers]

The good news: after 5 years, the finally put it onto their roadmap

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999?_ga=2.245804996.1524909343.1564501830-881791870.1544700561

The bad news: it's going to take them 12 months 😒

Atlassian's development pace really doesn't match their target customers.

[arsalan.khalid]

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/setting-up-public-access-934718729.html

[Tom Harris - Old Street]

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1220562/external-share-for-confluence

[Hanchul Kim]

I think Atlassian's office has no calendar for 2010's. Today, we have less than 6 months for 2020.

I'm not asking to see my documents via VR device, but just sharing.

FYI, I'm considering to move out to Notion. I'm serious.

[A_Raadls]

I agree Notion is coming up quickly and has a ton of features that Confluence is missing, although Notion still lacks some itself.  However within a year or so, at their pace, there may be nothing Confluence has that Notion doesn't!  That team has been working barely 2 years and has a multitude of ways to share out content with various permissions with just a few clicks.

Really hoping Confluence steps ups and delivers this feature in less than 12 months as recently announced here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999?focusedCommentId=2000111&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-2000111

[aigori]

I'm glad to hear that anyway. I waited for a long time already, but it's good to know my waiting will be over someday.

Thanks for the information.

[Deleted user]

We work with partners and have given them their own space in Confluence Cloud, removing them from every other space we have, but we want to be able to share individual pages from that restricted space with them. I thought by adding the partners' group to that page, they would be able to see the page, but they cannot. I'm not going to add their group to the spaces and then restrict their permissions on hundreds of pages, and hope that whoever creates new pages does the same. I checked your JIRA tickets, and people have been asking for this since 2006. There are over 1000 combined votes on similar tickets. I think you have kept your customers waiting far too long, That is no way to serve.

[Hassan Nasser]

yep still a problem for confluence cloud users I must say .. looking for an alternative

[Kurt Callebaut]

I suggested to create links to pages with enddate of availability. f.e. 4 hours valid, 2 days valid. to prevent spreading.

Another options should be to allow certain domains to accecs the links. hope they do something about. 

With the knowledge i have now about jira and confluence i would choose a server version instead of cloud... grtz

[Greg LoPiccolo]

FWIW, I am in the same boat as all the other folks on this thread.  I just assumed it was possible to create link to a doc and share it with someone outside Confluence.  I guess not. Maybe Confluence is not the solution I thought it was.  Guess I will go export all my design docs to Google now.  

[Kurt Callebaut]

You dont want to know what im running into the last 2 months while configuring. They try to make it right by support getting a 9 out of 10, but even community is better in support. In first place the tool should be from high quality level, But they don't have a QA or test team en let all the customers do the testing. They should really get on track again....

[Kurt Callebaut]

Wauw, while doing research for a new tool, i got so much information that is unclear. it looks like atlassian tools can do anything, once installed its a lot of work to install/configure and i run in too much missing features, that only can be solved on server and payed plugins for features that should be standard in this tools. its like a spiders web.

[Mark_Schultheiss]

Folks this is not going to happen given the time frame

• It is obvious they do not wish to expose public pages within a paid account scope without an account
• They do not wish to pay to serve public pages that are not secured by a username/account in this manner (oh wait, people pay for accounts and want to do this?)
• Pay someone else for content delivery/serving, it is obvious they do not have interest in this particular feature 

[Chris H]

+1 This has not been resolved and it drives me crazy. I tried to share a page with existing user and still he couldn't access because he didn't had access to the space. This is terrible and creates security risk as well as management overhead. Atlassian, please resolve ASAP!!!

[Larry]

Seems like other priorities are in play and what customers want doesn't really matter. I'm on about 4 or 5 other chains with flaming commentary just like this. I'm just not sure what to switch to.

[JeffreyNolte]

+1 this locking of accounts is pretty frustrating. There should be a way to handle this.

[Monique vdB]

@Ollie Guan would the plugin you mentioned be useful for some of these folks?

[Ollie Guan]

Yes, I think E-Mail this Page can meet the above needs.But this plugin is only available for Confluence Server.

[Declan Hannon]

Unfortunately this won't help those of us who use cloud. I'm just astonished that in this day and day Confluence doesn't let you share access. This has been a basic feature of FREE google docs/slides for half a decade. Even if it were compatible with cloud we would have to email pages out individually every time an update was made. It's just a shame that Atlassian don't seem to care about their customers or make any effort to liaise directly and get their roadmap properly prioritised. 

Thanks @Ollie Guan for trying to help here you've done more than Atlassian have lol

[Chris Cooke Old Street Apps]

Try External Share for Confluence.

Available on Cloud, and all other platforms soon :)

[Prashanth-GB]

+1 for this feature. I understand the complexity of sharing a page with external non confluence users if the page has links to other Confluence pages.

But atleast to start with, we should get this feature without thinking about links to other Confluence pages within shared page.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

NO!  Implementing a botch without thinking about security would be fatal.

It would be illegal to do this to Confluence in the second largest Atlassian marketplace and soon the third as well (unless it could be globally disabled, in which case you might as well not implement it)

PLEASE, think about data security before making silly statements like that.

[Eliav Ozeri]

@Nic Brough I do understand your concern regarding the security, and I  also would love to see that dealt with, however, for the love of god, how hard will it be for them to allow sharing pages that DON'T have links in them for nonusers for starters?? you would think it wouldn't take 4 years.....

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Same as above - if you're sharing the pages, you must trust this person, so make them a user, or make the page anonymous.  (Or scrape it and send separately, bypassing your security policy)

[Martin Plattner]

I do not agree with your argument.

From a security perspective, having to trust a user does not require to create an account for them just to share one or more pages. A sharing link contains a (secret) token and thus, does in some sense represent a password to access the shared content. Additionally, the sharing link can be revoked in case of potential leaks/compromise.

I think this is a perfectly fine solution, especially for less confidential content - and has successfully been deployed and used by many other services, eg. Google Docs.

[Tapio Haapala]

Lets hope that this come soon. At least as readonly share. Current situation is quite pain when we need make half of documents to google docs. 

[Jörg Zeipelt]

Confluence & Jira have extremely clunky roles and rights managements. We are strongly thinking about switching to other tools.

[Deleted user]

FYI - Public Pages is part of the Standard and above (paid) tier plans.
You won't see the menu in settings if you are using free tier.

Read through a lot of this until I found @John Tolle 's comment (thank you)

Lot of people saying it's not in their settings menu, however.

You need to be on the Standard or above plan.

[Peter Bruning]

Hi Jacob, I am not on a free tier and I still can't see it, from previous posts I gather that you have to ask Atlassian to add it

[Norman Timmler]

We are on a paid plan and do not see it.

[Deleted user]

@Peter Bruning& @Norman Timmler We did not contact Atlassian at all, it showed up as one of the first features after the upgrade for both my colleague and I (we got a tool tip from the settings page pop up).
We are both have highest level admin accounts, though, and I remember seeing something on needing to be a certain level of admin to enable Public Links (can't remember of the top of my head).
Also, I know that Public Pages can't be used in tandem with Anonymous Access.

Perhaps check in with another Admin to see if the setting has become available and double check Anon Access settings.

The setting for Public Links is in the Security pane on the side panel of Settings, under Space Permissions, and wasn't there before the upgrade.

Best I can do guys.

[Norman Timmler]

@[deleted] Thank you for your answer. I'm the super admin of our account (owner). So I think they maybe rolled that out only to a part of their customers.

[Erika Gorman]

Not sure why this thread was marked as Solved since it's very much an issue. External, non-licensed stakeholders should be able to view a page AND it's embedded macros. (One is useless without the other)

That being said, I did find a product suggestion link here: 
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-17750

Despite this discussion having over 47,000 views since 2014, there are only 20 votes on the suggested feature. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Solved in the community means "we had an understandable answer", not "it is fixed".

Views are irrelevant.  Votes count,and I suspect that "only 20" puts it low down on the list of Atlassian priorities.

[Do not tag me]

The thread is unsolved for 7 years now. High time confluence takes action on it. I don't see why they are struggling to release a feature so important like this. A view-only or suggest-only feature can and should be launched. So that using a plugin that barely supports the cause can be avoidable. 

[Do not tag me]

+1 To this. Although we can use external share, the formatting changes and it's very poorly reflected on us. Adding 90+ users who are not regular users of confluence seems illogical and confluence should have inbuilt external share feature. 

[Andrew Reeman]

Confluence is great for sharing all your documents...oh wait no you can't share them. Thanks.

Have used the recommended work around:

https://www.oldstreetsolutions.com/external-share-for-jira

However clicking on the share button (using the new editor) results in a faded black overlay and a Javascript error on Google chrome and Safari: 

Unhandled Promise rejection: Cannot read property 'exp' of null ; Zone: <root> ; Task: Promise.then ; Value: TypeError: Cannot read property 'exp' of null

We'd rather not use a plugin for such a basic feature. 

[Tom Harris - Old Street]

Hi @Andrew Reeman , 

Did you raise a support ticket when you experienced this issue with External Share?

We aim to quickly respond to your tickets and we are actively developing External Share so would love to help you resolve this issue 🙂

https://link.oldstreetsolutions.com/support

This support is provided for both the paid and free version of the app.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks,

Tom - Old Street Support Team

[Andrew Reeman]

Hi Tom,

That's great to hear. I'll raise a ticket with you guys. Thanks for responding! Better than some other companies.

I think I've narrowed the issue down a bit. Your external share plugin seems to work for most pages. Just not the particular one I wanted to share! 

Thanks Tom,

Andy

[Monique vdB]

@Tom Harris - Old Street 😉

[Tom Harris - Old Street]

Thanks @Monique vdB 🙂

[George]

+1 ...really pity not to go the collaborative way!

[Eric Themar]

I could not believe my eyes.

Sharing information with clients is not even a feature nowadays - it's a must-have. 

Amusing to see that this request is five years old now and Atlassian does not even react.

I must mention it is the X time I am looking for a simple feature just to find out I need some 3rd party plugin to accomplish my task. I am starting to regret my decision to use confluence.

[5meter]

Hi there,

is there any good Server Solution?

Best,

Kris

[Tom Harris - Old Street]

Hi @5meter , 

We're just waiting for Atlassian to approve External Share for Confluence on Server. We submitted it to the Marketplace last week so it should be approved soon.

I hope that offers you the solution you're looking for :)

[Mikkel Søgaard Jakobsen]

2020 still an issue. a feature where you can quickly send a link to a page in a read-only mode where readers don't have to log in would be greatly appreciated.

[Chris Cooke Old Street Apps]

Hi Mikkel,

Try External Share for Confluence. That should give you everything you need.

Thanks!
Chris