Granting Access to Specific External Representative with Access to Single Space ONLY
Asked by Charisma Riley:

We have a rep who would like to keep our teams up-to-date on their products that we use, using a Space in our Confluence Cloud instance. We would need to grant access somehow to only this person and restrict them to a specific Space made just for their use. Is this possible?


Answers:
author: James Dellow
body: You can configure Confluence Cloud to support a concept of "internal" and "external" users. This is a slide from [my 2014 Summit presentation](https://www.atlassian.com/company/events/summit-us/watch-sessions/2014/archives/collaboration-teams/purposeful-collaboration-in-the-cloud-with-confluence-ondemand) that talks about this:

![purposeful-collaboration-in-the-cloud-with-confluence-on-demand-james-dellow-11-1024.jpg](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/48464iE03F3A1B51D9769E/image-dimensions/500x281?v=v2 "purposeful-collaboration-in-the-cloud-with-confluence-on-demand-james-dellow-11-1024.jpg")

For your use case, you probably need to change your approach to space permissions and not use confluence-users group by default. Then you can grant that specific user access as a named user to a single space.

comments: author: Shannon S
body: Thank you James! I believe this might be similar instructions to the article I linked Charisma above. Could you confirm if it is or is not, and if not, how does it differ?

Regards,

Shannon


author: James Dellow
body: Yeah, effectively the same. However, I do prefer the idea of retaining an "everyone" group and not using it by default in spaces, rather than removing people from it. I have created Confluence sites before where we needed a common space that contained some shared image and file assets. In another site we created a welcome space, used for on-boarding and communication to all users (both internal and external).

So permissions model would be based on:

* confluence-users (everyone)
* internal users only group
* ad hoc external user groups for specific spaces


author: Shannon S
body: Thank you for confirming that, James!

Charisma - if you have any questions about either method, please feel free to let us know.

Shannon


author: Charisma Riley
body: We are set to try it out. I will report back soon.


author: Shannon S
body: Hello Charisma,

I assume you've already seen this documentation?

* [How to grant access to one space only to a user in Confluence](https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-grant-access-to-one-space-only-to-a-user-in-confluence-815244321.html)

If so, could you let me know if you had any issues with that article specifically? I'm happy to help you if you're stuck.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Shannon

comments: author: Charisma Riley
body: Well, the primary issue is that this does not allow an external user access. We have a third-party rep who wants to have a space to update. I am looking into whether that is a really secure option, since I see literally two options: 1) create an internal user for him. Although there is supposedly a way to limit him to one space, I also see vulnerabilities, so that concerns me, and option 2) we create a space and grant anonymous access, meaning anyone with the link that contribute. This sounds potentially dangerous. So, yeah. . . if you have more input on that part, I'd love to hear it.


author: Shannon S
body: Charisma,

You can only control permissions for a user who has a license in Confluence. Otherwise, they're just an anonymous user, so yes, you would need to grant anonymous access for them to access the site without a license.

About your concern, what vulnerabilities do you see if you were to limit him to one space being a licensed Confluence user? I'm not aware of any, provided that you set up the permissions properly according to that article. If you can let me know what concerns you specifically, I can help to alleviate that.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Eric Sebian
body: Hi Shannon. This didnt work for me. I configured as insturcted but about 14 of the 50 spaces are still visible to the user. see images. Please advise. ![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/52401i86F0FC2A09AA7082/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/52402i056BFC2E05BA004C/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/52403i025D9AC7D45CF606/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/52404i2391E39C662B9BF3/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/52406i2587A379ABA53A06/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud