Controlling Who Sees Your External Share for Confluence and Jira Links

Companies have been finding ways how to restrict which users can view their External Share links for Jira or Confluence. While previously, Atlassian lets you create a secure link for your Jira or Confluence page and share it with anyone outside your team, nothing can stop the person you share the link with from passing it to the next person. So even if your link is password-protected, the recipient of the link could also share the password with others without your permission. 

 

With the Selected Users feature, you can control who can view your External Share links.

What this means is that if there are data you don't want to share with others except for your direct recipient, it's now possible to restrict the visibility of the page. 

How to Share your Secure Confluence or Jira Link with Selected Users

Confluence

 

1. On Confluence share form, go to “Selected Users” tab then click “Share only with the following users.”

2. A box will open where you could enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the Confluence page with. If you enter more than one email address, you should separate them with commas.

3. Click Save. If you ticked the "Notify newly added users" box, after clicking Save, it will  automatically send a notification to the email address or addresses you listed informing them that a Confluence page has been shared with them. It's important to note that the users you added should have an External Share for Confluence account to open and view the link you shared or they need to register.

 

Once users log in to their External Share for Confluence account, they will be able to view all the external links shared with them. They will also have access to the External Watch feature which will notify them in case someone makes any changes to the page.

Jira

 

For Jira users, the steps are virtually the same as Confluence users. To use the External Share for Jira, go to the Selected Users tab and follow the same steps for sharing Confluence links. The users you will be adding should also have External Share for Jira account, or they will be required to register before they could view the Jira you shared.

Control Who Can Access Your Links

The Selected Users feature is a great security feature as it lets you protect your Jira or Confluence page from unauthorized access by an external party who may get a hold of your sharable link. You can specify certain email addresses or add email addresses from certain domains only. This way, if you'd like to add all email addresses that belong to xyzcompany.com, you can easily do so by adding the company's domain.

 

Moreover, in Confluence, you can also add restrictions to your share access at a specific space or at a global level. 

 

Follow these steps to restrict access to a specific space only:

 

1. On External Share for Confluence, go to Space Configuration > Selected Users.
2. Add the email addresses or domains of the people you want to share the space with.
3. Click Save.

Follow these steps to allow access to global settings:

 

1. Go to Global Settings > Space Configuration.
2. Edit the default settings or create your new configuration.
3. Open the Selected Users tab.
4. Add the email addresses or domains. 
5. Click Save.

The Confluence and Jira versions of the External share feature were added to give companies a better control of who can view or access their data. It works as an additional level of protection to ensure that your data will not fall into the wrong hands.