Restricting editing or viewing to just certain people or groups is possible, but can get hairy very quickly. Unless your page (or site) has very specific security or confidentiality needs, it's best to keep things simple.

Admins Only

This instruction assumes you are the space admin.

External Collaborators

If folks outside of SI/SAO need edit access to your space, they will need an invitation to create an account on Confluence. Contact Thompson, Keri

Giving users access to your space - step by step guide

(info) The default permissions for a new space are that anyone who is logged in to Confluence will be able to see (but not edit) content in your space.

  1. Make sure the people who need access have Confluence accounts. 
    1. Anyone with an SI network account can create their own account in Confluence by logging in https://confluence.si.edu/login.action?login 
    2. External collaborators must be invited to join Confluence - request an invite from the admins at Contact Us
  2. Go to Space Tools (Cog in lower left of the screen)
  3. Choose Permissions
  4. Under Individual Users choose Edit Permissions
  5. Search for the user by name
    (info) occasionally the person will not come up - if you are trying to add an SI user, try searching by their network username, i.e., the first part of their SI email address. If that doesn't work, ask the person to log into Confluence and add a page to their Personal Space - this forces Confluence to recognize that the user is active and will register them in the local user list
  6. Add them to the Individual Users, and customize their permissions.
    1. Typically, users should have permission to View All and Delete Own, as well as Add permissions for Pages, Blog, Attachments, and Comments
    2. If users need to be able to restrict access to specific pages, give them Restrictions add/delete
    3. Best practices are to limit the number of uses with Admin privileges to any given space

(warning) PROCEED WITH CAUTION IF YOU CHOOSE TO CHANGE ANONYMOUS PERMISSIONS.  

(warning) ONLY CHANGE GROUP PERMISSIONS AT YOUR PERIL.

Hide space

If you really, really, really, really, REALLY need your space to be available only to a small number of people, i.e., because you have sensitive content in your space (but not PII, because you would never ever put PII in Confluence)

You can Edit Permission for Groups and uncheck the boxes for confluence-users. Doing so will mean that no one except those explicitly listed in Individual Users will be able to view or edit any part of your space. It is then incumbent on you to add and remove those individual users who need access.



Restricting access to a page or portion of your site

(warning) this is when things can get messy so proceed at your own risk.

Each page can have view and edit restrictions that are more granular than the site as a whole. 

  1. Hover over the lock icon near the page title to see what restrictions are in place for that page. 
  2. To change restrictions, click on the lock icon or go to the ... in the upper right and choose Restrictions from the menu
  3. To restrict editing only, choose Editing Restricted from the drop-down menu. If you are the sole editor, click Apply, otherwise search for additional users who need editing permissions, then hit Add and then Apply .
  4. If you need to restrict both viewing and editing, choose Viewing and Editing Restrictions and proceed as above.

(warning) Once you place restrictions on a specific page every page below it in the hierarchy will inherit those restrictions.