Single-space guests now on Confluence Cloud!

[Davide Bonaciti]

I currently have an hybrid setup....on the user permissions I could set user as guest, but I miss the "Guests" section in Global permissions.....

[Louis Spieckerhoff]

@Davide Bonaciti I am missing this column, too... I am site- and product-admin, but i dont have this column. When adding the user in the space permissions as an indiviudal user, it does not work either.

I have to mind that we have 7 spaces, which are public/anonymously available for everyone. Those can be viewed by the guest, but not the one, he is invited to (which is not public!).

[Andy Gladstone]

@Jan-Hendrik Spieth Guests will only function as guests in existing spaces. They will not be granted a Personal Space.

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Thanks @Andy Gladstone for the clarification!

[Julia Foden]

@Louis Spieckerhoff @Davide Bonaciti I have the same problem. I am able to add a guest to the site but not to a space. 

@Nidhi Raj is it expected that the rollout will be staggered like this? When can we expect the guest functionality to be fully available?

[Muriel Mwema]

Just tested this feature and when finalising the onboarding steps, the guests are stuck in an endless loop and getting a "You're almost there" message....

Is working successfully for anyone yet?

[Nidhi Raj]

Hi All,

Yes, we are doing a slow rollout throughout the month of October. All customers should now be able to see the change in Users tab of Atlassian Administration. However, a successful invitation also depends on being able to see the Guest Users tab within Confluence Global Permissions settings. Depending on the cohort that your instance falls into, you will see this in the next few weeks.

We expect all customers to have the complete feature by the end of October. Thank you for your patience!

[Louis Spieckerhoff]

Thanks for the info @Nidhi Raj , that explains why we are missing the tab in the global confluence permissions :)

[Micheal Planck]

HOW? How do I use this? 

I added a user as a Guest. Eventually a confluence-guests group appeared. My guest is in there. But I have no idea how to get to the Org Admin site (I am every level of admin possible), and when I go to Global Permissions the field "Space Access" simply does not exist.

What does this mean? What can my guest access? How would I know? Why is Confluence so unbearably opaque? I do not do site administration 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I only do it when I need to administer the site. Adding a guest to a specific space should be simple enough that I don't need a degree in Confluence Operation to do it. And in sheer point of fact I have added a guest, I just have no idea of what that means because the screens I see do not match the screens in this post.

EDIT: So apparently even though I can add a Guest, I cannot actually add a Guest.

Only God and Confluence know why someone would add a feature half-way. What does that even mean? What status does my guest have? Why would you give me a button in my application and then tell me in a random community post not to click on that button because it doesn't do anything yet? How does this make sense to anyone who has ever done software development of any kind? Seriously: what is wrong with you?

[Micheal Planck]

UPDATE: So this morning I magically have a Guest permissions tab. However, I still can't use it, because I don't have any Guests, no matter how many times I add my Guest to the confluence-guest users group. Clicking on the ever-helpful Invite button on the Permissions pages takes me to the Users page where I add the user to the Guest group; then I manually navigate back to what I was doing at the Permissions page (because why would Confluence ever have a linear path to accomplishing any goal), which tells me I don't have any Guests so I can't assign them spaces.

And in any case, I can only assign a guest to 1 space. Why? For the love of God, Montressor, WHY? I understand there has to be a limit; 5 guests per space seems quite fair. But why 1 space per guest? Why does my guest have to create a separate fake email to see 2 spaces? All I want is for him to be able to read some documents (never edit). This all seems so unbearably difficult, just to be able to hand a link to someone and say, "here read this page."

[Bassam Gemayel]

@Michael Planck

It is called a single-space guests feature - that is "why".

Moreover, it is a beta feature, looks like you are trying to use it on your customers, which is a bit harsh - unless they are subscribed to it.

You are fun to read, and I do understand your frustration, still, thought I would share a perspective.

[Micheal Planck]

@Bassam, I didn't know it was a beta feature until I discovered it didn't actually work. :)

[Max DiOrio]

A couple days ago in the Atlassian admin portal, I had the option to invite a guest user to Confluence and assign them a space - awesome, simple UI, so easy.  Now that's gone when I actually go to attempt to use the feature.  It's much more complicated a setup process than it was.

I was finally able to add the user and add them to the guest group.  After this, it took about 5 minutes before the guest user filtered up to Confluence.

There I can set the space they are allowed to access.

I do like the notification that guests have access to the space.  

[Nidhi Raj]

Hi All!

We have now completed the rollout of our beta and all Confluence Cloud Standard, Premium and Enterprise customers should now have the feature and be able to use it. 

Admins can follow the instructions in the support article in order to set up guests in your instance. We have an additional article that granularly explains what guests can and can't do within Confluence. We hope these help answer most of your questions. Do reach out to our support teams if you need additional assistance.

We hope this feature allows you to collaborate with everyone, regardless of who they are!

Happy collaborating! 

[Micheal Planck]

So you consider the partial roll-out of a feature that does not work for a few weeks - but does not tell the user that it does not work until they discover for themselves that it does not work - to be successful.

You will repeat this experience. You will continue to add buttons that we should not click until we come to this forum and read every post made in the last six months.

Because this is your idea of professional software development? You are using your paying customers as alpha testers. We are paying you for the privilege of doing your work.

At least Microsoft only makes us pay to be beta testers.

[John Humphreys]

Hi,

This may mean I can stick with Atlassian Confluence when moving from on prem to cloud.

Can the guests be users inside your organisation?

Can the space also be set to public access?

I have a knowledge base space that students can publicly access and then staff when logged in can access the restricted pages within that knowledge base. So that they just get an expand view and knowledge is all in the one space.

Regards,

John

[Aileen]

This is great! I've just started using it and it works really well.

Is there an open idea ticket for this to be extended to multiple spaces for the confluence-guests?

[Christine Absil]

"Visual Guest markers for internal users to easily see what content is shared externally"
do not understand what it means :(

[Christine Absil]

Would it be possible that this beta-feature

• mixes everything up (in the permissions)?
• introduces the confluence "internal" groups? (never saw these before)

I have activated it yesterday, and now

• access to space pages is problematic
• I cannot select org-admin level groups in the Permissions anymore

Looks like a big big mess to me :(

[Matthias Heinz]

We test the feature and currently we are very happy with it.

Will it be possible in the future to use the  "include-page-macro" (https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-the-include-page-macro/ ) and include content from different spaces? This is very important to share same information with different customers. If they only can read this pages this is sufficient, their is no need that guest can edit those contents.

kind regards

[Axelle Grioche]

Hello, I still can't use this feature on my site. Can you help me because it is very expected on our DSI to interact with our business. 

[Daniel Bakker]

Been playing around with this functionality.
2 remarks:
1. It is called Single-space guests but multi-space guests would be way better.
(Why only alow 1 space?)
(Now we need to merge spaces to make all the information available)

2. Giving access should be the way other access works as well.
So Space-permissions add guest role or users. 
Instead of a new screen where we can only select 1 space for each guest user.

[Christine Absil]

@Daniel Bakker I guess "one space" is a volontuary limitation. If free users could do everything as paying ones, who would still pay?
So free guest is for sporadic contributors, while team members should pay. Sounds quite fair to me...

[Daniel Bakker]

@Christine Absil 
There are multiple ways to create a limitation. 
I have multiple users who log in once a week/month and contribute nothing (just reading).
Now I have to make 1 space with all information instead of different spaces for each subject. 
I would be helped with: Make a read only guest user and remove the limit of one space.
So many people, so many wishes...

[Yatish Madhav]

@Nidhi Raj thank you for this article and thank you Atlassian for this functionality. We are still adopting administration of our Confluence sites and we are also moving some items away from a MediaWiki implementation. I think and hope this would be very handy feature. Will post if there is any issues on this. Thank you