In the first ever issue of Monthly Dose of Confluence, we take a closer look at sharing Confluence content with the outside world and explore convenient, safe, and large-scale options.
Confluence is built for collaboration but many teams want or must share the fruit of their labors with the outside world. Sometimes it’s just a single page. Sometimes, you may need to share several spaces with your clients… but not always with the public. As always, Confluence modular nature offers plenty of options. Read on to learn which one works in which scenarios.
For the record, we decided not to mention copy pasting content into emails or Google docs.
Take a Seat on Confluence
Granting a collaborator, whether an active or passive one, a paid or guest seat is always an option… that admins tend to shy away from. Paid users cost money and may impact licensing plans. Guests, on the other hand, are free and their access is limited to a single space at a time. But as we discussed earlier this year, scaling Guests management is a daunting effort.
But, if active sharing – collaboration and participation – is the goal, guests are welcome.
Public Convenience
Do you need to go… and share a random page NOW?
That’s easy, click Share, click Public link, and Confluence will create a public URL that you can share easily. It’s read-only but, many times, it’s just enough for final drafts, early access release notes, etc.
The trouble with public links is that anyone with the URL will be able to see the content so you’re relying on the integrity of the other person (or the NDA they signed).
As with guests, once a public link outlived its potential, you should disable it for the page. When someone updates that page with information never intended for public view, they turn a useful feature into a security risk. Which is why some admins flat-out disable the public link option…
Universal Exports
PDF and Word formats are great for both one-off and long-term sharing of Confluence content, and may become an integral part of the publishing part of your documentation strategy.
That’s especially true when you need to publish offline documentation formats due to compliance requirements – whether yours or your clients'. In such cases, pre-defined processes minimize the risk that users will look up an old version of documentation – especially if you watermark your PDFs with an expiry date.
Using PDFs and Word files for one-off, random content sharing has its obvious risks – once a physical document leaves your outbox, you're losing control over what happens to it. Always think twice and refer to your data security policy before you share anything.
AA - Access Anonymous
Opening a Confluence space for anonymous access is the most common method to share content of entire spaces with the world wide web. Especially for companies that use Confluence as their product documentation CMS.
While the Confluence user interface is not the prettiest, it’s functional. Yet many teams resort to using a theme app that can extract Confluence content from a public space and put a custom CSS skin on top of it. That, however, keeps the underlying Confluence space open to the public.
While anonymous view-only access to Confluence is not inherently unsafe, many companies disable it for security or compliance reasons.
There are practical downsides, too. Anonymous access always applies to the entire space. One needs to be careful not to publish a page that’s not ready. Cross-space content reuse is also problematic – you either cannot use it, or you have to allow anonymous access to other spaces.
Tinker, Tailor, Publish Sites
We’re now entering the zone where what and how you share borders on being a double agent. And yet, this perceived ambiguity is very common in the world of product documentation with multi-tenant audiences.
A far more nuanced approach is needed to cater for the following simultaneous scenarios.
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Product documentation is publicly available.
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An extended version of documentation is only available to customers after login.
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Some pages or sections must be publicly available but hidden from the public view.
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No anonymous access on any Confluence space.
Companies want their documentation to be public to streamline customer experience, allow for easy feature discovery, and help technical evaluators to assess their product. At the same time, they don’t want to make certain details public to protect their assets – but they need customers to be able to access those sections. Giving all users from all customers a Confluence seat is a nightmare from both a financial and an administrative point of view.
However, many teams handle this complexity with surprising ease.
How? They stop sharing the Confluence Kitchen and start serving content in the Dining Room. Whether it’s a big open party or RSVP-only curated access, that’s up to you. And your tooling.
By decoupling your public content from Confluence using a specialized tool like Scroll Sites, you can build a dedicated website from carefully tailored Confluence content. That gives you control over what, when, and how you share, while achieving true architectural isolation of your authoring (Confluence) and the publishing environment (a static website).
You can put in-depth service manuals behind an SSO login for customers and keep early-access release notes hidden via unlisted URLs. All generated from your secure, internally locked Confluence site, available via a tailored solution fully comparable with any documentation tool.
A spy drama turns out into the beginning of a beautiful friendship 🙂
News
Remix is officially rolling out!
Yes, it's true! Remix, one of the most anticipated Confluence features is rolling out and we managed to lay our hands on it. Is it really as transformative as the hype would have you believed? Can you really transform a page into an attention-capturing infographic?
End of Life for Confluence XML Exports on Cloud
Yes, the feature native to Confluence since the beginning of time, whether on Server, Data Center, or Cloud, will no longer be supported after December 1, 2026 on Confluence Cloud. All is not lost, though...
Spotlight
Join us live to invite some Guests into Confluence
Ever wondered how to manage Guests in Confluence? Join our customer advocate Matt Reiner and Editor-in-Chief Kris Klima as they discuss the pros and cons of using the Guest feature on Confluence, its benefits, risks, and the best practices for corporate-grade policies.
Sign up up here or watch the stream on YouTube.
Relive the live stream experience
Since the last Weekly Dose of Confluence, Matt Reiner ran two webinars which proved to be highly popular. If you missed them, you can watch them on YouTube
In the Confluence Automation and Database Design live stream, Matt explored space-level automations in Confluence using AI-powered Rovo agents. He then turned to Confluence databases, showing how to build interconnected tables that automatically sync relational data like events, speakers, and rooms across an organization.
Expanding on the theme, in Matt dug deeper in the Let's Build Advanced Rovo Agents for Confluence, Jira, and Loom stream as he walked through the process of building and customizing AI agents using the new Atlassian Studio beta, emphasizing a collaborative "always be chatting" approach with Rovo. Matt showed some hallucination preventing techniques and best practices for configuring Gmail, Slack, and automated time-based triggers.
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