A Useful Hack to Quickly Make Your Confluence Space Read-Only

Confluence became today’s way to keep your information all in one place, share ideas, and take decisions together with your team. It is getting more and more popular among modern enterprises all over the world. The more team members in your company use it, the more profit you receive. Because Confluence facilitates collaboration and knowledge sharing across the entire organization.

Companies use Confluence for different purposes. The most popular are:

• Intranet site – to collaborate on the projects within the company;
• Extranet site – to use it as a public documentation portal to share information with the customers.

We have already written a blog post about how to start your successful Confluence experience. This time we want to show you an easy way to make your space read-only for your colleagues without changing the global permissions. Let’s see what we are talking about.

Permissions in Confluence

Confluence offers three-level permissions structure that allows you to choose the actions users can perform:

• Global Permissions refer to the actions in Confluence at a site level;
• Space Permissions determine your actions in the particular space;
• Page Restrictions allow you to control who can view and edit your page in Confluence.

Confluence system administrator can edit the global permissions: grant permissions to individual users, user groups, or even to anonymous users. Note that if your system administrator opens viewing to anonymous users, you lose the ability to choose who you want to share your content with.

We will show you the way a space administrator can set up a read-only access for the space using the anonymous access in the space permissions when the anonymous access in the global permissions is turned off. But first let’s see the usual way to limit access to a space for Confluence users.

How administrators usually do it

For example, we have a space called ‘Internal Rules and Regulations’. We need to set up the following permissions:

• all employees from different Confluence groups can view the space;
• the ‘top-management’ group and system administrator can view and edit this space.

All Confluence users are added to the ‘confluence-users’ group by default and have access to all spaces. By default they can view and edit information in spaces.

In our case the system administrator deleted a standard ‘confluence-users’ group because he uses the external user directory to manage Confluence users. For that reason we have different user groups for all departments of the company.

So we need to add each user group to the space permissions. We go to the space directory, choose our space called ‘Internal Rules and Regulations’, open the space permissions, and manually add all the groups to the space permissions.

It wasn’t difficult but a bit tiresome. The good news is that we know a quicker way to fulfill this task.

An alternative approach to make your space read-only

We will change only the space permissions without editing the global permissions.

We go to the space permissions, add only the ‘top-managers’ group, and turn on the view permission for anonymous users. Anonymous users outside the company can’t view this space because global anonymous ‘Use Confluence’ permission is turned off.

We receive the same effect like in the first example. All licensed Confluence users except the ‘top-managers’ group have a read-only access to this space.

It is an alternative way to manage your space permission in one click with no need to edit global permissions. It helps you to avoid mistakes and quickly show your space to all users without making a mess in the permission set. To prevent the leak of your data, make sure that the anonymous access in the global permissions is turned off.

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If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post.

First Steps in Mastering Atlassian Confluence

We continue our blog post series for Atlassian newbies. We have already published two articles featuring different ways to start your Jira experience:

Atlassian Sources

Traditionally, we start our list with the resources Atlassian offers for Confluence beginners.

Atlassian Documentation

Starting your Confluence experience from Atlassian documentation makes sense. Here you will find all the required information for using Confluence to its full extent.

Both Confluence Cloud and Server Documentations have the same contents structure.

You can check two useful tutorials ‘Navigate Confluence‘ and ‘Space ace‘. In Confluence Server Documentation you will also find a quick start guide with the detailed Confluence information. At first, it may seem that there is too much information for a beginner. No worries, just follow the well-structured step-by-step guide.

Atlassian Confluence Blog

This blog is full of useful tips for all Confluence users and is essential if you want to be aware of the latest Confluence news.

You may sort out the articles by topics you are interested in. You will find blog posts about the latest Confluence features, new add-ons, or real-life use cases. We recommend you to subscribe to this blog if you want to receive some fresh ideas, announcements, and inspiration for your team from Atlassian.

Atlassian University

Atlassian University offers ‘Getting started with Confluence‘ course for beginners.

You can choose the most relevant training content for you and your team because this course is available in various packages:

• On Demand – for those who like to study on their own.
• Public Virtual – a real-time interaction with an instructor and students from other companies in public classes.
• Team VIrtual – a private class for your team delivered over a WebEx session.
• Team Onsite – custom solutions for your team.

Upon completion you will learn how to use Confluence not just as a repository of content, but also as a collaborative working environment.

Today the price for individual On Demand course starts from $300.

Atlassian YouTube Channel

We think that practice with the help of video tutorials helps a lot, because you can follow the process step by step while listening to the tutor’s explanations. For that reason we offer you to check Atlassian YouTube channel.

All the videos are divided into topics, so it is easy to find what you need. You may like the following:

1. Confluence Demos
2. Confluence Tutorials
3. Confluence Webinars & Presentations

Atlassian sources is a great start if you want to understand Atlassian values and philosophy. And, of course, one more good thing about using Atlassian sources is that you get the proven first-hand solutions.

Courses from Atlassian Partners

You may ask, ‘Who can teach me Confluence basics except the Atlassian team?’ We think that the courses from Atlassian Solution Partners are worth your attention.

cPrime

cPrime delivers Agile Project Management and Software solutions to large enterprises. They have training courses both for beginners and power users. We think that it is better to start with Confluence User Fundamentals – Online. This online training course consists of 4 modules, each module includes demonstration, lecture, and exercises. You will discover how to work with your page content, learn about templates and blueprint fundamentals, and will have an overview of macros.

StiltSoft

As an Atlassian Silver Solution Partner and Atlassian Top Platinum Vendor, Stiltsoft today has 4000+ customers from more than 80 countries worldwide. Our primary focus is app development. We’ve also released our free training courses for Confluence administrators that start their experience with this powerful platform and novice Confluence users.

These courses have included all our best experience collected over the eight years of company operation.

And more

Lynda.com

This learning platform offers a wide range of different courses with mostly positive feedback from readers. Installing and Administering Atlassian Confluence is a good choice for beginners. You will learn how to set up and create content of all formats in Confluence, use its community and social features. This video tutorial also provides information about creating users and groups, managing tasks and notifications.

To take this course you need to sign up. After that you can choose the learning plan that suits you best.

What to start with?

Atlassian offers a trial period for all their products. We think that practice can be the best way to study Confluence. So install Confluence and try to use it for a couple of days. If you have questions, consult the Atlassian sources we mentioned in this blog post.

We offer you to proceed to the paid courses once you study free solutions and check your skills in practice. Of course, it’s up to you to decide which of the options to choose.

We hope that this blog post will help you to start your successful Confluence experience. Feel free to comment below if you have any questions about Confluence usage.