Office hours: How to (securely) collaborate with external users

[#1]

Today’s question opens up a whole new world… of permissions! 🔐 See below for guidance on securely collaborating with external users within your (virtual) walls.

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Question of the week

Q: How do I bring external users to my site?

A: You can give access to anyone who isn’t logged in to your site by assigning them a license with specific permissions or (for Confluence) via guest access*. These could be contractors, clients, partners, 3rd party vendors, or anyone else who is not part of your organization but would benefit from certain information and levels of collaboration.

*Bonus: Guests don't consume a Confluence license! Every startup dollar is precious, so I know you like the sound of that. 🤑

Let’s break it down by product:

Confluence

Here’s how to invite guest users to a Confluence space (without provisioning them a license), and what guests can see and do within that space.

1. Invite them to join your Atlassian organization.
2. Give them product access to Confluence as a guest.
3. Assign them the space they’ll be collaborating in.

While bringing external users to your site can open up a world of collaboration, there are default space permissions set for guests to ensure you’re giving them access to only what you intended.

The settings for guests are as follows:

While Confluence is designed to be open and collaborative, view and access permissions can be customized to make your site, spaces, and pages as open or closed as you want. This is a good page to reference, and I’m always happy to chat in more detail live… perhaps in a future office hours session?

Jira

Jira also has the flexibility to configure what users can do/see. The simplest way to effectively manage external users is to:

1. Provision them with a license in Jira.
2. Assign them a specific project role.
3. Customize permission schemes for that role.

TL;DR: Your internal and external users should have two separate roles and permission schemes. Learn how to set this up seamlessly.

To manage this, go to: Settings → Issues → Permission Schemes

In this example, access is granted to project roles, groups, or any logged-in user.

• Any logged in user means (just as it sounds) that ANY user logged into Jira has that permission. 
• If it's a permission you do NOT want an external user to have, you'll need to remove Any logged in user from that permission and add a role that your internal users have and external users don’t.

Tip: I’ve found that testing permission settings in a sandbox can be helpful to avoid locking anyone out while making changes.

Lastly, this article on permissions is a good one to keep for reference when you want to look something up. Happy collaborating! (I told you it was a whole new world 😜)

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Peggy’s Picks 🎁

• Sign up for early access to Live-Edit Pages in Confluence!
• Use Bitbucket? Check out this guide to help you get started.
• Did you know you can create Jira issues directly from a Confluence whiteboard? Learn how it works. 

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See you in office hours! 👋

Can’t make it? Don’t forget about our September AMA for Startups, where you can submit your questions throughout the month. 

[Andy Gladstone]

How to safely and securely invite external users/collaborators into an Atlassian Cloud product instance is such a key knowledge share for Startups. I hope that everyone in this group has read this article and understands how to properly extend the functionality of your Atlassian products to the myriad of consultants, PTE's and contractors you may be engaged with in your day to day operations.