Purpose

As a Confluence Cloud Administrator, you would like to set up a space in Confluence that can be accessed by a specific user or group of users, but you don't want that user or group to be able to access other spaces. 

You want your existing users to be able to continue on accessing spaces as they currently do, but you need to add a new group of users and give them access to only a specific space. 

Solution

Step 1 - Create a new group for existing users and a new group for your new users

This will ensure existing users can keep on accessing the spaces they've been accessing up to now.

1. 1. Open User Management (via the cog icon) and create a new group called staff (or similar)
   2. Add all of your existing users to the staff group.
      
   3. Create a new group for your new users, in the example I'll call it external
   4. Add the new user(s) to the external group

Step 2 - Set up new default permissions for new spaces

This will make sure that when a new space is created, all members of the staff group are given access to it like they would have been before we made these changes.

1. 1. Navigate to the Space Permissions page.
   2. Click on Edit Permissions
   3. Type staff (or the name of the group you created in Step 1) into the 'grant browse permission to' text box and click Add.
   4. In the table you'll now see the staff group, check the appropriate boxes so staff matches the confluence-users group.
   5. Un-check all of the boxes for the confluence-users group.
   6. Don't forget to click save

Step 3 - Update the permissions for your existing spaces

Next, you're going to stop users who are only in the 'confluence-users' group from accessing the existing spaces

1. 1. From the Space Permissions page, click on the Manage Permissions link next to the first of your existing spaces.
   2. Click on 'Edit Permissions'
   3. Type staff (or the name of the group you created in Step 1) into the 'grant browse permission to' text box and click Add.
   4. In the table you'll now see the staff group, check the appropriate boxes so staff matches the confluence-users group.
      
   5. Don't forget to click save
   6. Repeat this for each of your existing spaces

Step 4 - Update the permissions for the space you want to be accessible by your new external group

1. 1. From the Space Permissions page click on Manage permissions for the space.
   2. Click on 'Edit Permissions'
      
   3. Type external (or the name of the group you created in Step 1) into the 'grant browse permission to' text box and click Add.
      
   4. Check the required boxes to give this user group access, but don't remove the staff group this time.
   5. Don't forget to click save
      

Step 5 - Add all users in the external group to the confluence-users group

You can now add the new users to the confluence-users group so they can access confluence.