How can I remove the need for permissions?
Asked by Robert Galos:

How can I grant permissions for my entire org to access my wiki site? Essentially, I want to remove the need for permissions/restrictions altogether and have it public to those in my company.

Appreciate the feedback fellas. Per your advice I created a group that includes everybody in the company and gave them read and edit permissions (In my use case I do not care who does what on this site, as long as they are an employee)


Answers:
author: Rodney Hughes
body: "public to those in my company" is a contradiction in terms!

public access with no login requirement is set when you set up the Space for "Anonymous" Users, but it means it is just like a public web page on the internet - "the entire world" can see it

but the moment you want to have a select set of people as the only people who can login then they each need a User Profile to limit who can login to the site .. maybe you can hide the instance behind a firewall where it somehow only accepts traffic from within your company domain? I am not that much of a corporate LAN / IT dept guru on that.

You could have a generic "company user" account which gives them access to everything .. but firstly if they post something, you don't know who the person is ..  
secondly when content changes in the system, where does the system send the alert email to?  
and thirdly when someone leaves the company you have no way of removing access for that individual - they still know the login unless you then ask the entire company to remember a new username/password

But don't forget Permissions define what the individual person can do in a particular Space .. and one Space may be different to another Space for the same User. - i.e. in a particular Space, can all Users create pages, all edit pages, all delete pages; all add attachments, all remove attachments, all blog, all add comments to pages, all remove comments from pages ... and is that same range of capabilities the same in a different Space?


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Make the spaces available anonymously (last line in the space permission settings)

comments: author: Robert Galos
body: My company does not allow anonymous access unfortunately


author: Rafael Corredor
body: Hi Robert,

If anonymous is not an option, another one to consider is to grant admin permissions to the employees group in Global permissions (<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/global-permissions-overview-138709.html>).

In this case, space permissions are not necessary because they can view/edit anything in all the spaces.

Obviously, it has some cons:

* Restrictions are useless (they will be able to see all the information)
* They are automatically space admins so they could even delete spaces

Logically, they should not have system administration permissions :wink:

comments: author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: No. Admins could potentially destroy your entire system. Never do this.


author: Rodney Hughes
body: I agree with Nic


author: Randy
body: Do what Nic mentioned and make all of your spaces available anonymously. You can edit them all quickly by going to "Space Permissions" in the system settings and click "Manage Permissions" next to each space.  

comments: author: Rodney Hughes
body: Allowing Anonymous access and "removing the need for Permissions" are two different things.

Anonymous means anyone can access the Space without logging in. Imagine that "unknown person" creating or removing thousands of pages from the Space .. you have no idea who did it!!

So you could apply Permissions to the Anonymous user that they can't create or delete pages .. but perhaps they can edit content on pages that do exist? or perhaps they can only add Comments to the page?

Permissions must still be set for the Anonymous user account


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: It's quite difficult to explain it directly, so let me approach it from a different way.

How do you know that someone should be able to do \<action x\>? Without permissions, you actually can't answer that question.