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What is the best way to allow a user (external to the company) access to only a few boards in Jira, and a few spaces in Confluence with the same login?

pmorgan October 20, 2013

I think I said it all in the question... :)

6 answers

1 accepted

5 votes
Answer accepted
cbenard1
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October 20, 2013

Hi Pmorgan,

Though the following route may require a bit of setup it's certainly the best way. The first part is understanding that inherently JIRA and Confluence are open tools so the projects and spaces are shared with everyone.

We'll be taking the approach of changing that openness by default to restricted by default.

JIRA:

Firstly you'll want to check and see what restrictions (if any) you've already got in place. If everything is default most of your access will be managed through project roles and it's likely that those roles include stock JIRA groups (Users, Developers, Administrators, etc). Once you've verified that you aren't allowing anonymous access by default you can take the following steps:

1 Create a new group in the Global Users admin section. Call it whatever you want, usually something relative to your group of users. In this case we'll call that group 'test'

2 Go to the Global Permissions page and add the 'test' group to the 'JIRA Users' permission and any other permission level you want these users to have.
** Please note that when a group belongs to the 'JIRA Users' permission newly created users are automatically added to it. This won't be a problem if only the group you are working with needs the restriction

3 Create your new users (if they haven't been already) and add them to the 'test' group. Then remove the users from all other groups but 'test'
** This will allow the users to login to JIRA but only see content made available to the 'test' grou

4 Create a permissions scheme that includes the 'test' group for the roles you wish and apply it to the projects you'd like that group to view

Confluence:

This will be building off the JIRA instructions

1 Go to the Global Permissions page in Confluence (<YOURURL>/wiki/admin/permissions/globalpermissions.action) and assign whichever permissions you wish as long as the group has 'can use' permission.

2 Now you'll need to go the ther Space admin for each space you'd like to grant the users access to and manually add that group to the appropriate permissions for the space

Now all of your users in that group (as long as they aren't in any other groups) should be restricted to seeing the appropriate projects/spaces

Please note that if you create a new user for this group be sure to go into that users settings and remove them from the 'Users' group as they'll be automatically added upon creation. This restriction only works if users are limited to the specially set up groups.

Thanks!

Turner

pmorgan October 21, 2013

Thank you! Great instructions, I was able to follow very easily - one thing I did that you didn't mention (that might make it easier for someone else to follow) was to copy the default set of permissions here:

4 Create a permissions scheme that includes the 'test' group for the roles you wish and apply it to the projects you'd like that group to view

Thanks again :)

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9 votes
Chris Cooke Old Street Apps
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
September 24, 2019

Maybe External Share for Jira and External Share for Confluence would be the solution?

Rather than set up complicated permissions, and a dummy account with a shared password, you could just share the specific pages and issues you wanted.

They'd be password protected, you could turn them off anytime you wanted (or even put an expiry timer on them) and have granular permissions on whether you wanted to share daughter pages or linked issues.

External Share screenshot 2.pngexternal share jira tickets screenshot.png

Arthur Mack
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January 11, 2020

This solved all our JIRA And Confluence share issues. Both apps work like a charm.

 

Thanks

2 votes
Joe Harmon April 5, 2017

I can't seem to find the JIRA Users permission under the global permissions section.   I see Jira system administors, jira administrators, browse users, create shared objects manage group filter subscriptions, and bulk changes.  Nothing under global permissions that allows me to add a test group to the JIRA users group.

1 vote
Natalia Lezhai May 2, 2018

Is there any way to restrict view permissions for only one internal group in Confluence, so that external users were not able to see spaces unless they are in that group?

0 votes
Jerry Ryan Ishmael December 10, 2020

Anyone try or use this with the next-gen projects? 

0 votes
Hung Dinh October 20, 2013
For Jira: 1. Creating a special user groups and assign customer account into that groups 2. Set permisson for that groups or create a project roles permission plan for them 3. The board permision + group permision can both be used to configure what you need You can do the same with Confluence spaces

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