Allow users to view pages without gaining access to whole space
Asked by Jonas Gucu:

Hi,

<br />

Situation:

1. User A creates a page

2. User A shares page with user B for viewing

3. User A gets a warning message saying that "user B needs access to space first".

This seems kind of backwards, now user A needs to give view permission to his space for user B. User A only wants user B to see that one page, not the whole space.

Thank you.


Answers:
author: John Price
body: This is why space design is important. Spaces are designed to be by topic or by team, so you should be able to give people the same access within a space 99% of the time. Confluence is designed as an open info sharing platform with the ability to lock down specific things - it's the opposite of SharePoint/OneDrive where the paradigm is "everything's private unless I share it".   

It might help to know that every page has a full version/audit history and you can easily be notified on a change and revert it. For example, my team supports 4000+ developers and we have a large Dev Tools Support documentation space. Even though I "own" the docs, any of those 4000 people is allowed to edit or improve them if needed. It's very rare that someone does that, and usually it's helpful (they fix a typo, etc.)/


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: It's not backwards, think of it like a library - when you want to read a book in there, you can't do it unless you have access to the library. "Here, you can read this book, but you can't come in to do so" makes no sense.

There are two options that go around the need to have access to the library directly. Anonymous access makes the library open to all without needing an account, or you can enable public shared access which lets a library user show the book to someone through the library window (to stretch the analogy a bit)


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: [@Jonas Gucu](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4541715) - er, yes you did, you asked if Atlassian had plans to downgrade the permissions model to a less flexible and less collaborative one.


author: Jonas Gucu
body: [@John Price](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1137254) thank you.

[@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/781454) nobody said anything about downgrading.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: [@John Price](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1137254) has articulated it better than I would have. The permissions management is designed for open sharing and collaboration.

So there are absolutely no plans to downgrade it.


author: Jonas Gucu
body: I tried it out myself and setting "Everyone has no access" works. So if I don't want a user to see pages I will have to go through them all and set access manually.

To be fair, this permission management is not very flexible (atleast for pages), e.g., I might want comments on some pages, but not on others - this is currently not possible.

Users should be let to decide for themselves. Any plans on upgrading this part in the future?

Thank you.


author: Jonas Gucu
body: To expand a bit further:

if user A has 5 pages and wants user B to only see 1 page - what should be done? I understand now that user needs access to space, but how to configure which pages are visible to user B? Is it possible? Does putting up the restriction "Everyone has no access" on pages works?


Tags: cloud

confluence-cloud