Security for external customer access
Asked by Paul McCormick:

Hi,

We are currently using JIRA and Confluence OnDemand for product development internally within our business. We now want customers and business partners to access our Confluence wiki documentation referring to our products.

We have created a new group external and added a user to this. The idea being we could lock down this group and users access within the OnDemand service. This has worked but we have some issues:

1. Site home page / dashboard is now available for both internal and external users, not ideal but can work around with a new page space to redirect this, but users can always navigate back to the dashboard. Can this be stopped?

2. On the site home page can I remove the recent updates all together and leave welcome message and spaces?

3. I don't want these users browsing: people directory, network, user settings, space directory etc...they should see nothing.....can this be done?

4. Can I disable the profile and and personal space for this user/group as we don't want them having access to this?

Maybe we are going about this wrong, but we want to lock down our complete site for customers and partners so that they can just view a single space about our product documentation.

Can this be done?

Thanks,

Paul


Answers:
author: Bruna Griebeler
body: Allow me to post here the answers given by another support engineer so other customers can access it:

*1. Site home page / dashboard is now available for both internal and external users, not ideal but can work around with a new page space to redirect this, but users can always navigate back to the dashboard. Can this be stopped?*

I believe that if you have provided the user in the *external* group to only have Confluence Application Access, it would be fine; as when the user first logged in to the instance, he will be redirected to the Confluence page, together with just the **Partner Portal** space being shown at the front page.

*2. On the site home page can I remove the recent updates all together and leave welcome message and spaces?*

I believe that this is not possible without customisations to the instance, mate. Sorry about that. But what I noticed is that the updates are pertaining to the related space itself, so wouldn't that be okay for you?

*3. I don't want these users browsing: people directory, network, user settings, space directory etc...they should see nothing.....can this be done?*

At the moment, this cannot be done as these requirements require server-side configurations, and we're afraid that these configurations are not carried forward in proceeding upgrades.

*4. Can I disable the profile and and personal space for this user/group as we don't want them having access to this?*

This feature is also not available at current time, mate. There is a feature request that addresses this though, and judging from it, you're not the only one who requests for this feature. Here it is: [Restricting access to user names and profiles](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-1882). We cannot provide an ETA for this, but hopefully it'll be soon. Kindly raise the awareness of this feature request by voting and commenting on it, as well as watching it for any updates.


Tags: cloud