Share confluence page to non user

Tim Chapman September 4, 2013

I am testing sharing some of our confluence content to external users.

I've added an external email address, and the linkis shared, but it then prompts the user to login. They don't have an account. The page specifically states:

"The recipients can be Confluence users or any email addresses."

How can they access the information?

Thanks

Tim

56 answers

1 accepted

9 votes
Answer accepted
Gorka Puente _Appfire_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
October 21, 2014

Hi @Tim Chapman,

We're about to release the v2.0 of Share Attachments for Confluence. In this new version, we allow the sharing of pages with non-confluence users, so you can send any page without giving public access to your Confluence instance.

Regards,

Gorka

Ashleigh Brennan August 21, 2017

No good for Cloud instances and this is also a paid add-on. There needs to be a better solution.

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Barney Wimbush September 7, 2017

[deleted]

Der Lurch December 10, 2018

We would really like to see this plugin available for Cloud instances of Confluence. We cannot use Confluence in the current state as link sharing is not possible.

Like # people like this
Declan Hannon December 10, 2018

I completely agree we cannot roll out confluence to our 200+ staff base until this feature is available. If anything we are looking elsewhere should this feature not become available soon.

 

I'm extremely disappointed with the complete lack of proactive responses from Atlassian staff members.

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Chris H February 20, 2019

Paid plugin for such feature is unacceptable!

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Kurt Callebaut May 23, 2019

indeed, what is this.. ?

pages should be readable through link for everyone. i'm getting a bit tired of all the missing features that are solved by payed plugins.

How can i explain to my management that a documentsystem cannot share documentation for readonly ? 

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Tom Harris - Old Street
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October 27, 2019

Hi everyone,

If you are still looking for a solution to this exact problem on Confluence Cloud we have developed an app called External Share for Confluence that allows you to create secure, anonymous links to any Confluence page. No extra Confluence licenses needed!

There are additional security features including setting passwords and expiration dates for each link, as well as controlling if those anonymous users can add comments or attachments to the pages.

External Share for Confluence.png

We've also released a free Lite version that has all the same features, with a limited number of links to get you started.

Let me know if this is a useful solution to this issue, as I can see you've all been waiting since 2013 and it's still a problem...

Like # people like this
Kevin Lee November 25, 2019

is external share a paid add-on ?

Guy Osher-Lahav December 5, 2019

Looks like it is a paid add-on as well, ATLASSIAN team, this is very disappointing. 

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Chris Cooke Old Street Apps
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
December 5, 2019
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Do not tag me July 16, 2020

With limitations. The problem is not that the plugin is paid, the problem is that it does not support the formatting and is also very difficult to manage from within confluence. 

Like # people like this
Cord Nitzsche July 30, 2020

Wow, I can not understand how Atlassian is missing out on such a super basic feature. It's a bit like a car manufacturer missing out a windshield. Seems to be ok until you start using it, then it su**s hard. 

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John Tolle December 9, 2020

In case you're landing here from a search engine, this feature already exists (although it was added somewhat recently), at least for the Cloud version of Confluence:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/set-up-public-access/

Insanely, I don't know if it's possible to find that link using a search engine.  I tried every search term I could think of.  I even searched on Atlassian's official documentation site and could not find it.  I received it via a feature update e-mail from Atlassian.

They should have also updated this page, which does not (currently) mention it:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/share-a-page-or-blog-post/

I added this to the "Accepted Answer" thread in hopes that most people can find it, rather than at the end of this entire conversation, which will likely carry on forever since it's almost a hidden feature at this point.

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Eric Themar December 9, 2020

Incredible!!! You solved one of the biggest mysteries of Confluence and finished one of longest post ever seen at this forum. True hero! Atlassian - this man deserves a medal!

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Gabriel Fonseca December 9, 2020

@John Tolle unfortunately I didn't found this option on my Confluence 😢

John Tolle December 9, 2020

@Eric Themar, thanks!  That said, Atlassian really needs to do a better job on their documentation, or at least on the visibility of it (because much of the content is quite good).

@Gabriel Fonseca, the Public Links feature does need to be enabled by a Confluence administrator.  If that's you, check out the top of the article, which explains how to enable it for your Confluence instance.  If you don't even see the setting in your instance, I would encourage you to reach out to support.

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Monique vdB
Community Manager
Community Managers are Atlassian Team members who specifically run and moderate Atlassian communities. Feel free to say hello!
December 9, 2020

@John Tolle thank you so much for sharing those links! I'll reach out to the team about the documentation for this feature. Again, much appreciated. 

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John Tolle December 9, 2020

Thank you, @Monique vdB.  I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say that's much appreciated!

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Peter Bruning December 18, 2020

I am a Site administrator but there is no option for Public Links available within settings, Has this been removed? (using the Cloud version)

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Peter Bruning December 18, 2020

I also noticed that the article on Public links tells you to select your Profile picture first and then click settings which doesn't make sense since this takes you to personal settings instead of site settings

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Gabriel Fonseca December 18, 2020

I wasn't able to find that option too 😢

Like Andrew Reeman likes this
Guillermo Gonzalez Fernandez January 20, 2021

Neither do I, even though I am an administrator

Like Hal West likes this
Aaron Hong January 22, 2021

@John Tolle I'm a bit confused. I enabled Public Links, created a public link for a page with no restrictions, copied it, and tried it in an incognito tab, but all it does is ask me to log in.

Does a public link mean anyone with an Atlassian account can view it, but they MUST have an Atlassian account?

I do see in the documentation that they are trying to distinguish it from "anonymous access."

Can anyone else confirm my observations?

---

Edit: Oh, never mind it works. It was just buggy. I had to disable the public link and reenable it and it worked the second time. Maybe right after I wrote this comment someone at Atlassian fixed it for me :)

John Tolle January 25, 2021

Actually, that sounds familiar.  I vaguely remember encountering such a situation but could not reliably recreate it, so I didn't bother putting in a bug report (all developers despise intermittent bugs!).  But maybe I should have...  Otherwise, perhaps it's just a caching delay?

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Peter Bruning January 27, 2021

Sorry but I still have no idea where to find this option on Cloud even as a site admin.

The instructions on the link are as follows:

  1. Select the cog icon at the top-right of the navigation.
  2. Select Settings. (clicking the cog icon takes you straight to Settings but anyway)

  3. Click Public links on the left. (????)

There is no such option to be found anywhere.

I checked and Anonymous Access is already disabled (it states that you can't combine Anonymous access with Public links so just in case this affects it)

Has anyone got this working on the Cloud version?

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Jean-Sébastien Rouette April 11, 2021

I was able to use this option too. 

By default when you click on the Settings button on the top right of the page you can see and edit the General configuration.  

public_links.jpg

You have to click on the public links and then authorize public links in the Security section.


Then once activated, on each Confluence page you have the option available once you click on SHARE.

share.jpg

Like Machiel likes this
Norman Timmler April 29, 2021

@Jean-Sébastien Rouette I just do not have that option. We are on the cloud version.

Chris Fortmueller June 16, 2021

Same, I am a site admin, anonymous access is disabled, but the "Public Links" option simply is not there (cloud version)

21 votes
Philip Mease August 11, 2017

This one has killed me and have been slowly transitioning to Google Docs, which is actually working out pretty nicely so far.  I feel like Atlassian is missing the mark on newer companies who are lean and work with consultants and end-users directly.  But maybe that's just me. 

AnnWorley
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 11, 2017

What prevents you from adding an account for the external user, and giving access to just that page? Do you not want to use a license or is there also a technical reason?

Philip Mease August 12, 2017

I work with a lot of people from contract manufacturers to beta testers to end users to retailers.  They all need access to various bits and it's turning out I need to have a particular users I trust have access to an otherwise private area.  Usually these folks aren't employees but end users who are interested in helping develop a product along side.  With Google I just enter their email and the permissions heirarchy is as simple as adding it to a folder.  I can even have a 'share link' and anyone with that link can see it immediately.  No setup or manually creating accounts.

Then there's the licensing issue of taking up seats per account and I'd quickly be paying for lots of users that individually rarely use the tool.

I've done the export thing and that's, well, only read-only and the export is very basic.  Some of the pictures don't land right and I also put videos on some pages. 

It's just not a very 'sharey' tool.  Any public spaces are just that - public and it's the whole space which can be dangerous when you have to go in and restrict individual pages after the fact.  There is an area between private/secure and public.  And full private is easier to setup on something like Drive as well.  All you need is an email.  Login issues and me forgetting to unrestrict or set up permissions on a particular page have ended up costing some time and some folks kinda don't want to deal with any of that.  The end users in particular (who are being generous to me with their time in the first place) don't want to have to create new accounts and login to a tool that is new to them.  Most folks kinda just don't do it.  And since they aren't employees I cannot demand anything.  So it's got to be easy so I get more folks writing and reading.

So to answer, it's both.  Maybe I've missed something major here but I do not think this has been addressed considering no solution has been offered to the OP since 4 years ago outside of the server-based and paid for add-on.  So I think it's time to bail, unfortunately.

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Ashleigh Brennan August 21, 2017

@AnnWorley Still awaiting a response for this. The above comment from @Philip Mease highlights a lot of issues that I think many users are feeling, and so far I've seen nothing from Atlassian to try to remedy the situation.

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Barney Wimbush September 7, 2017

[deleted]

Tiago Melo September 19, 2017

+1 here about this. It's critical for us to be able to share single pages public. 

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Gabriel Fonseca October 4, 2017

+1 here, same feeling of "unresponded requests" not only in this case, but in a lot of other little needs, where the solutions would be buy a plugin or have an unhandled open case here.

Like Joana Cardoso de Afonso likes this
Charles Convent January 9, 2018

+1 This is exactly what I was trying to do today. Ending up exporting some pages:(

Daniel Roziecki January 14, 2018

+1

I don't want use Google Docs for this, don't want use exports... Only simple "share user with email".

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Christian ee January 17, 2018

@AnnWorley +1

 

Is it possible to share a single page to a existing user which doesn't have access to that space? Because for me it doesn't work. After inserting username and pressing the share button I get a green checkmark, but then when I press the share icon again there are no users in there. And the user get a error message when he wants to access the page (not available).

AnnWorley
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
January 17, 2018

@Christian ee If a user does not have permission to see a page, the page cannot be shared with them. The share feature does not add permissions or remove page restrictions.

Christian ee January 24, 2018

@AnnWorley So when I understood you right, it's not possible to share just a single page from a space to a user when it doesn't have permissions to that page. So why you implement a share button that it's not a share button at all?? 

It's really bad that I have to give access the user to the whole space and then restrict all other pages so that he can see just the only one page. Because every time you create a new page you have to restrict access for the user again and it has to come into your mind to do this. Both things are a very bad user experience :-/

All cloud sites have this functionality to give access to a single page but you don't?? When do you plan to implement this "state-of-the-art" feature???

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
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January 24, 2018

It's for sharing with people who have permission to see it.

Like Arthur Mack likes this
Christian ee January 24, 2018

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-, ok, yes but why just restrict it to these users? I can understand it from the point of security in a huge company where the users shouldn't share details from one space to other users. But the admin wo has the rights to change permission should be able to add an "opt-in" for a single page for selected users. This is a basic functionality for iCloud, Google drive, Nextcloud, Dropbox,... and so on. Atlassian marketing is saying that you can put all your files from that services into confluence because it's easier (and it is) but they don't have this pretty basic functionality within Confluence??

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
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January 24, 2018

You might think it's "basic", but have a read through the conversation, and more usefully, the request that has been raised to get it added.  It's simply not that important or useful a feature for Atlassian to bother (yet)

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Kara Betts February 27, 2018

Thanks, Nic. Just testing the software to migrate to from another wiki and within an hour of testing, this is already an issue for me. Single source of truth for content curating and document management optimally means flexible and nimble view and share policies. I want to create some documents which are internal and external at the same time. E.g. I might want a single environment policy that i can share a link to externally to view without sign in, have internally for staff, and embed on a our webpage and be publicly visible. 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
February 28, 2018

It's the same answer as above.

Declan Hannon November 16, 2018

@Caroline Bartle How is this not important functionality? As a business analyst I am required to work with many many stakeholders both within and outside of the business. The fact I cannot share specific confluence pages without sharing the whole space and restricting every page (i have hundreds) is extremely problematic. I had started looking to move my google docs over to confluence however confluence is just so sub par. You cannot do the most basic things like change your font size... (outside the predefined headings or paragraph) or share individual pages with individual contacts. I just cannot understand why such critical functionality is missing. It seems Atlassian are either to slow to match the competition (which has already surpassed confluence) or just don't care about the feedback being given. Four years some of these issues have been raised for.. I don't care what company it is, four years is an unacceptable period to not even acknowledge requirements let alone implement them.

 

This must be a native feature that does not require paid licencing to manage.

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Abi Horstmann May 17, 2019

I'm also a BA and didn't realise until today that you couldn't share a page to external email addresses and needed a third party app.  

We also can not justify giving licences to all of our 3rd party suppliers, it would be a management nightmare.

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18 votes
Tom Harris - Old Street
Rising Star
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October 27, 2019

Hi everyone,

If you are still looking for a solution to this exact problem on Confluence Cloud we have developed an app called External Share for Confluence that allows you to create secure, anonymous links to any Confluence page. No extra Confluence licenses needed!

There are additional security features including setting passwords and expiration dates for each link, as well as controlling if those anonymous users can add comments or attachments to the pages.

External Share for Confluence.png

We're also bringing out a free Lite version in the next few weeks, it's just waiting for Atlassian marketplace approval!

Let me know if this is a useful solution to this issue, as I can see you've all been waiting since 2013 and it's still a problem...

peter_jayawardena October 28, 2019

I note that you sight this app as being free. I was pleased to see that this functionality would not drive my costs. But that was not to be. I see that this app is priced for the cloud on a similar if not the same basis as Confluence itself. How do you describe this as free?https://confluence.external-share.com/content/b7702594-c4c3-4407-a692-e978996c1019

Tom Harris - Old Street
Rising Star
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October 28, 2019

Hi @peter_jayawardena ,

Great news, the Lite version of External Share for Confluence is now available! It has a reduced feature set compared to the Pro app to get you started 👍

When you're ready, the full Pro version is up to 5x cheaper per user than Confluence, so is a significant saving.

I hope this helps your users 🙂

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9 votes
Ross Gerring July 31, 2018

+1 from me.

The use case for this is really simple.

My company is a digital agency. We have multiple clients, large and small. We use Confluence for the majority of our documentation on our own systems, AND for the systems/projects of our clients that we're working on.

We work collaboratively with our clients. For each client (Organisation), we'd like to create a space in Confluence, probably identified by the name of that Organisation. For each of these spaces, we'd like to grant access to one or more employees of that Organisation. Some will have read/write access, some just read access.

That's it.

Naturally we don't want to create full user accounts for all employees (that need access) for all the Organisations (100+) that we work with.

Hoping that Atlassian will come up with a smart solution one day for this.

Ross

8 votes
Daniel Schmid December 2, 2015

Hi @Mauro Ezequiel Fernandez Badii

@Tim Chapman is askings something different, Sharing a page with external non-confluence user. Like you can do on Google Docs with Share-Link. Something which I also would like to see. Same as my collegues.

Setting up public access for the whole wiki or even a space is not an option. ONLY a secret link for a single Page

@Gorka Puente [Comalatech] unfortunatly your tool does not work with cloud based Confluence OnDemand

Deleted user May 1, 2019

Update: Confluence onDemand no longer exists.

Comala does support Confluence Cloud instance.

5 votes
Deleted user April 4, 2019

Congratulations, it's been 5 years since this has been brought up.

Happy Birthday guys!

Gabriel Fonseca April 4, 2019

Why did you do a new irrelevant nextgen copy trello board and didn't do this????

Happy birthday ticket. bcb688b0842b6dc0dca5383c03b2a2bf

Like # people like this
A_Raadls September 23, 2019

Just noticed this comment @gabrielfs , tend to agree with your assessment of Next-Gen, very Trello like as one of the big pride points early on was the ability to add images in cards.  How hard was that particular feature to add to the Classic Jira in the first place?  Which I believe does not have it still.  Really wondering how long Atlassian planned to have people in two versions of Jira.  Could you imagine if there were two versions of Trello out there?  Or if the likes of Asana, Basecamp etc. would ever imagine splitting users across what are in essence the old, and then updated, version of their app? Kind of like Apple leaving two iOS'es out there and asking users to choose which is better while neither is full featured.

5 votes
Declan Hannon November 16, 2018

This has not been solved so why is it marked as such?

@Caroline Bartle How is this not important functionality? As a business analyst I am required to work with many many stakeholders both within and outside of the business. The fact I cannot share specific confluence pages without sharing the whole space and restricting every page (i have hundreds) is extremely problematic. I had started looking to move my google docs over to confluence however confluence is just so sub par. You cannot do the most basic things like change your font size... (outside the predefined headings or paragraph) or share individual pages with individual contacts. I just cannot understand why such critical functionality is missing. It seems Atlassian are either to slow to match the competition (which has already surpassed confluence) or just don't care about the feedback being given. Four years some of these issues have been raised for.. I don't care what company it is, four years is an unacceptable period to not even acknowledge requirements let alone implement them.

The fact this thread has so many comments yet still gets marked as solved seems to demosntrate the total apprach taken by the Atlassian team. Cloud is no longer the future it is the present yet is being totally neglected of the most basic of cloud based requirements.

 

This must be a native feature that does not require paid licencing to manage.

Randy Morrow November 20, 2018

Yea, I don't see us staying with confluence very long.

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5 votes
Caroline Bartle
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 26, 2017

Hi there - I'm a product manager for Confluence Cloud. Thank you for your comments on this discussion thread, and for the feedback on the use cases where privately sharing with anonymous users is crucial. 

As per Ann's earlier comments, there is a feature suggestion open for this where you can comment and vote: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999.

This feature isn't on the Confluence Cloud roadmap, however it hasn't been ruled out for inclusion at some point in the future. It is clear that this type of sharing would be a useful feature, which is why the suggestion hasn't been closed.

Nicholas Hutchings November 23, 2017

It seems to me that people have been asking for this since 2014 and clearly there is a need. I notice that someone has even developed an external plugin (unfortunately just for the server solution I gather). So I don't understand why this feature isn't on the roadmap for cloud. Perhaps not a high priority for you, but still worthy of road mapping. 

 

From my point of view, it is yet another reason for me to look for a solution elsewhere. And bit by bit I get to the point where Atlassian just no longer rates on my radar. This feature could help with stickiness for your customers, but it's just pushing me away. First helpdesk ticketing now knowledge base ... once I move those away, I could then question whether Jira has a place in our business. 

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Eliav Ozeri December 7, 2017

@Nicholas Hutchings I totally agree, I don't understand their logic behind this, I really like Jira but they seem to be pushing their customers away, if you have any good suggestions on where to move, please share.

Like Declan Hannon likes this
Nicholas Hutchings December 7, 2017

To be honest @Eliav - we've reached the stage of building in-house with a wordpress instance. Also looking at the Zoho wiki option that comes with their Helpdesk

Like Paul K. likes this
Mic fok January 30, 2018

@Caroline Bartle Please consider how many people have posted in this thread, and for how long. I 100% do not want to trust a sharing feature to a Third-Party plugin, and even if I did, we use Confluence Cloud and wouldn't be able to use Comalatech's solution anyways. I really liked writing tutorials and guides in Confluence but if I can't share them with non-atlassian members on an ad-hoc basic I won't be able to use Confluence. 

Like # people like this
lubrication_theory July 11, 2018

Hi! I am a product manager myself, and I understand well that not every feature can be added to the product, sometimes you have to say now. But I am confident that this feature is not a corner case. I think this feature is absolutely necessary for people who work with external clients a lot: consulting teams, website and app developer studios. This seems like a whole chunk of you audience. The reason why you might not be seeing any activity from this audience is beacause... they are using docs, paper and etc! I think you guys should do more research into that, I just can not believe that this feature is not useful for many puseful. In the mean time, we are not going to use the product, as we have to work with external clients all the time. Having the ability to share documents with them and for them to leave comments on the documents is crucial. Sharing a pdf over mail and the receiving edits over email and updating the documents seems like a lot of hassle. I need the ability to allow external people to view and comment on the documents in the system. 

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5 votes
Ashleigh Brennan August 11, 2017

8 months later and I'm getting the same issue - anyone have an update on this? Would also like to be able to share a page with a single external user, rather than making it public.

Ashleigh Brennan August 11, 2017

Update: There is an add on in the marketplace for this, but it's not free and is only for the server version of Confluence, which doesn't help those of us using the cloud solution.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keinoby.confluence.plugins.share-attachments/server/overview

Surely there has to be a better answer to this?

AnnWorley
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 11, 2017

If the page is not available to anonymous users and the user does not have an account, they will not be able to see it.

Would it help to export the page and email it to them?

Ashleigh Brennan August 21, 2017

Not really, since exporting the pages makes an absolute mess of formatting a lot of the time, and is limited to Word or PDF. Also means we have to export and import constantly to update, which completely defeats the point of Confluence (intended to reduce our use of emailing documentation back and forth!).

To me this is a serious oversight on Atlassian's part. As mentioned in other comments, even free services like Google Docs allows this kind of sharing!

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4 votes
A_Raadls July 25, 2019

I have been getting updates to this regularly, and very glad to see the community so vocal that this "old" thread keeps getting viewed and built out, I hope Atlassian will take note as you guys really need to speed the dev process.  I am really disappointed how slowly basic features come on line from a company that prides itself as basically the caretaker of Agile, and Lean for that matter...

I wasn't sure if all of you saw this but there was a post, about a month ago, from Atlassian that the feature is finally coming...

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-32999?focusedCommentId=2000111&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-2000111

But within the next 12 months??  Again, I cannot fathom how a company of Atlassian's capabilities, with this much desire among users, for the past 10+ years!!!,  for such a simple feature, cannot get this done more effectively?  You are a high-flying, NASDAQ traded, well-regarded tech giant.  How many other software unicorns would need years to simply add some sharing capability to a basic feature of your product?  This makes me wonder about the technical debt of your original architecture, or some other deep backend problems, which also raises doubt about investing in Atlassian tools going forward as I've spoken about elsewhere in the community.  Another great example of this is the very long timeframe for moving Jira in sync with the Classic and Next-Gen versions its been divided into, seems to be taking forever, as is evidenced by massive amounts of user activity & dissatisfaction here in the community in those forums.

I remain hopeful that speed will pick up with you guys, and you will respond more quickly and readily to user sentiment here in the community.  You should have a look at a fast-moving competitor, ClickUp, and how they respond and engage with their user community. I would like to know that the tool I invest in to run my software business cares about me and respects the investment I'm making.  Not to mention in Agile/lean, you are supposed to deliver in small increments to meet the needs of the user/customer.  If there are tools out there that do that, such as ClickUp, they may ultimately win over my business.

Thanks for listening guys!

4 votes
Laurens de Vries April 3, 2019

I've received many requests for this exact piece of, in my opinion, basic functionality. Wake up Atlassian!

4 votes
Deleted user March 23, 2019

+1 looking for this feature

4 votes
A_Raadls March 1, 2019

+1 and I agree, this is borderline arrogant on Atlassian's part to have a huge "share" button that most users will associate with how that works on iOS, Google Sheets, Dropbox, etc, but in reality it's a farce and you can't.  There are a lot of complaints across the web that Jira/Confluence are "90's" tools and the likes of Airtable, Gitlab, ClickUp, Notion etc. are much more tuned in, nimble, UX friendly, eager to provide gobs of features for free.  It really appears that Atlassian is getting bloated and management could use a resent in Lean and Agile methodologies themselves.  Like "you should provide what the customer wants" as a top priority.  It is amazing this feature has taken so long, what else are they working on?  The new Confluence template is horribly bug ridden and full of useless features I can't imagine users want - who wants the title of the page to be center-justified and not easily moved back to the left like most documents and Wikipedia format?  That's just one example...

4 votes
Stefan Traunmüller November 8, 2018

Hi there,

 

we really love Atlassian products. It's easy to collaborate and get things done within one toolset which is connected. Having Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence is really nice and saves a ton of time. Most of the time you work internally and it is okay to set up users and provision them. I also understand that Atlassian is a company which needs to make money and the solution of sharing a page or space with clients and they can act as an internal user without paying anything is not an option.

Since you are promoting yourself as leaders in a digital collaborative environment and even give insights into UX and personas/customer journeys within your blog please try to understand your customers as well. Not all of us have a single product which they work on. In most cases we have different customers and even more products which we are working on. So we get in touch with a lot of people. Some stay with us for a longer period and some just for some days. Some are collaborating extensively with us, some probably just a single time. If we work together with our customers heavily it's not a problem to get them into our ecosystem. Our customers are paying their seats and they appreciate it because, they see the benefits. That's just fair.

But in some cases you only want to share a single page to get an approval or something similar. We want to collaborate with them since having a single source of truth is crucial. Building an internal Wiki and duplicating the content into word, google drive whatsoever is definitely not an option. It's decentralizing our system and generating a lot of troubles.

Since bashing at you and threatening to leave the plattform does not help you to understand what we need I will try a different approach and come up with some options:

Option A

The export functionality is sheer nightmare (even tried different export addons). If you are building complex pages with tables and different content (sections, columns...) the word and PDF exports really look crappy (sorry to say, but bad doesn't even come close;) ). It's nothing I would forward to a client. They would lose their trust in us as a digital agency. Since we are creating an HTML page - why not add a static HTML export (single page or multiple pages within a hierarchy would be supercool). No problems with styling. The customer can view the output on mobile and desktop as well.

It's not the most convenient solution since no collaboration is involved, but at least we get something out of the system which has the quality for a client handover and there is a single source of truth when editing the content. Conversation can be done on a different channel.

Option B

Even better would be an anonymous sharing functionality. So no need to export a page but just generate a simple link. No need for different users and rights permission. Anyone who has that certain link can view that page. No need to set the space to anonymous and secure all the different pages for internal eyes only (from an agency perspective that's a security issue as well. People will make mistakes and something not considered for client eyes will be revelead at any time - people make mistakes). Big advantage here is - no additional export if you update the contents of a page.

Option C

Similar to option B but with the possibility to comment on a page as well (No editing - plain comments - similar to Jira Issue collectors). No need for an E-mail, registration or whatsoever. Just put in a name (store it locally so it can be reused) and add a comment. That's it. If there is an update the agency has to take care that the customer gets informed.

Option D

Same as C but with a guest E-Mail login. It must not be connected to any kind of permission. Sharing is still done on a page level and limited to commenting but with the big advantage, that a customer is informed, when there is an update or we comment anything.

----

We would love if you consider to set one of these options worthy to set them on a future roadmap. If you have any questions feel free to drop me an E-Mail or even call me and we can discuss on different approaches, needs... 

Again - we love Atlassian products - but let's make them even more awesome :).

cheers

Stefan

4 votes
Feyola October 11, 2018

I must add another +1 to this issue. Completely agree. I'm a game designer and I want to share my one-pager doc to possible investors. I can't. I must translate my confluence doc to google docs. Why I must write it in confluence in the first place? Awful...

4 votes
Eugene Dementiev July 10, 2018

We also absolutely need to be able to share a page to an external non user, at least as read only

4 votes
thomas king April 12, 2018

Why is this marked *solved*?  It is not solved.

I have recommended Confluence many times in the past, but today as an influencer, I can no longer recommend Confluence--this is one of many reasons.

By not addressing the awkward roles and rights mgmt, (and other long-standing short-comings) Atlassian is begging for people to go elsewhere.  They create an opportunity for better solutions which have addressed these and other flaws.

My current company is very unlikely to pick Confluence. 

4 votes
Philip Mease December 26, 2016

Has anyone a solution for this question yet?  I'm in the same boat.  Right now it seems like it's either fully private or fully public with no middle ground.

3 votes
Sheri Atwood November 2, 2018

Adding my +1 as well. As the CEO of our company I am pushing our employees to one solution and was keen on moving out of word docs etc using Sharepoint. HOWEVER, at least with Office 365 I can post my doc on SHAREPOINT and share FOR FREE. I simply wanted to share out messaging document with our external press people who DO NOT need access to anything else nor do I want them to have access. After going thru the painful process of uploading, reformatting, etc I now realize that unless the person is INTERNAL or I PAY for yet another license and then force a press person to login (which alone is painful) or create a shared user ---that negates the purpose of security --- its useless.

In a world of more and more outsourcing and cloud solutions - Heck Atlassian wants us to "outsource" to their cloud offering we can't even share a page to anonymous users that doesn't require a login. So for that I'm moving off of Confluence and going back to Sharepoint. Office 365 today - with Sharepoint and Teams is built in to the price, much easier and one solution!


Sad as I was such a supporter!!

Farid Benamrouche April 25, 2020

Blocked as well, moving the whole company out because of this missing feature.

This will take us time to migrate the documents, what a pity.. Canfluence was getting nice, this is a so stupid limitation.

3 votes
Ross Gerring August 25, 2018

I've previously posted that my company is a digital agency with multiple clients, and that we'd like to be able to create documentation for each of our clients, and then share it with them in a collaborative, wiki-like way.

Given that this is not viable with Confluence currently, the next best thing appears to be to encourage each of our clients (who can benefit from shared documentation) to create their own Confluence account, and then for them to add a single user account (e.g. info@...) for my company to that Confluence account.

The above solution is not ideal, mainly because it's not as collaborative as a well thought out shared solution, but it does the trick.

3 votes
Martin Plattner August 24, 2018

+1

As others have said, why has this issue been marked as solved? It isn't.

Obviously it's a crucial feature (nowadays) to be able to quickly share one or more pages with external parties, without having to create an account for them.

Do you actually suggest that I create 10 user accounts and set permissions to share a short text of a project proposal with my client's company that has 10 employees?
Sorry to say that, but that's just impractical and unworldly.

Sad to see that Atlassian rather sees longstanding Confluence users leaving their product(s) just to make some additional license fees here and there...

3 votes
Jason Linthwaite June 11, 2018

Being a Confluence user, I also cannot understand how I cannot share a single page with an external user. This is such a common occurence, e.g. sharing a policy for review with a regulator, or sharing a document with a temporary team member. Being a company that uses suppliers regularly, your solution to just make the page anonymous is not satisfactory and neither is the solution to add user / remove potentially every couple of weeks, or more if the users on the supplier side is changing.

This really has to be incorporated into the product. The only reason I can see for not doing it is that it forces us (small businesses) to purchase a higher volume license and then pay more money in order to allow people access to the document.

Currently I have to recreate the document in another storage mechanism and so makes me wonder if I should actually just forget Confluence altogether and use a different system.

Many thanks.

Martin Plattner August 24, 2018

Completely agree with you.

Like Aileen Bruce likes this
3 votes
Chadd Bennett February 28, 2018

Confluence's collaboration features are awesome, and so is the goal to centralize knowledge and information. Understandably licensing is part of the business model, and most sharing occurs between internal users, but we all share information externally!

But without anonymous external sharing of individual pages, our users will just default to duplicating content (no!) in a free competitor's platform, such as Google Drive or OneDrive

From the IT side, it makes alternatives more appealing to not have to provision new users anytime someone wants to share externally, or worry a plugin will break on an upgrade. Sharepoint, heck, even the open source Documize  has external sharing with link expiration. 

While the aforementioned alternatives offer "free" external user access, even offering cheap buckets of "external user licenses" limited to x pages would be better than nothing. 

On the upside, it might drive actually drive additional license purchases to avoid "Who is Anonymous Aardvark", and might get new users to see how great Confluence is and tell their teams about it!

Atlassian Team, what do you all use when you need to collaborate externally with an external partner on a just a single or few pages ... do you provision new users and futz around with permissions?

3 votes
Mauro Badii
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 4, 2013

Hi Tim,

You'll have to enable annonymous access to your Confluence instance.

Take a look at this guide for instructions; https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Setting+Up+Public+Access

Cheers!

Mark Schultheiss August 8, 2016

Page Not Found - so pick one from the list...whichever matches a need...

Barney Wimbush September 7, 2017

[deleted]

2 votes
Deleted user April 30, 2019

6 years have passed, the problem is not solved. I still have to write stuff in Confluence and then start emailing the exported PDF around. I will strongly push my client to ditch Confluence, this a travesty of a solution.

2 votes
Barney Wimbush September 7, 2017

[deleted]

Sandy Johnson September 14, 2017

Barney

Voting with your feet. I like it!!

Sandy

Like Hal West likes this

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