Can I restrict Confluence in such a way that a group can only access 1 space - without having to restrict every other space?

[Jeff Foss]

Because Confluence is so easily searchable, most of our spaces and pages do not have restrictions - we want everybody (developers, product owners, BAs, stakeholders etc) to be able to dig and find what they need.

However, we now have a group of vendors in Confluence - and I only want them to have access to the space that contains documentation on their project. In other words, I don't want them to have access to our entire universe of unrelated and sometimes externally sensitive documentation.

Do I need to go through EVERY OTHER SPACE in our Confluence instance and restrict them all to the rest of company, leaving off the one vendor group? This would take forever!

Isn't there a way to restrict Confluence access so that a group can only access 1 space, page etc?

[Milo Test]

Actually, unless you allow anonymous access, ALL of your spaces have restrictions.

The easiest thing for you in this situation is to put the vendors into their own group and only add that group to spaces to which they should have access. You may need to lock down specific pages in those spaces, but that is better than sitewide.

[Jeff Foss]

@Milo Grika any thoughts? Thanks again for the help here.

[Jeff Foss]

Thanks Milo! Here's where I'm struggling: By creating a vendor group, I am essentially including them as part of "Everyone" - right?

Screen Shot 2016-01-22 at 11.19.03 AM.png

Since most of our documentation is open to the proverbial "Everyone," it seems like I wouldn't be able to through the spaces I want them to access and add them as you suggest (because the vendor group is included by default as part of "Everyone"). Rather, I'd have to do the reverse: go through all the spaces I don't want them to access and grant access to all users except the vendor group. Am I missing something?

Another option would be to create a massive all-company internal group and restrict every single space to this group only (leaving the vendor group out) - but this too seems like a messy and time-consuming workaround.

[Milo Test]

That is exactly what I am saying. One idea might be to move all the semi-public pages to their own Space so you only have to deal with Space permissions.