Confluence Groups for Administrators

Grouping users in Confluence is a great way to cut down the work required when managing permissions and restrictions. Once you have a group of users, you can assign that group a set of global permissions. For example, if you don't want that group of users to be able to create spaces, you can revoke the 'Create Space(s)' permission.

Other users can also take advantage of Confluence groups. Space admins can assign a set of space permissions to a group rather than to each individual user, and other users with the 'Add/Delete Restrictions' space permission can add and remove page restrictions for groups.

Special groups

There are two special default groups in Confluence:

1. confluence-administrators: This is a group of 'super-users' who can access the Confluence administration screens ('administration console') and perform site-wide administration. Members of this group can also see all spaces and pages in the Confluence site. Any user who is a member of this group has site-wide administration powers, regardless of any other setting. The settings on the global permissions screen do not affect the powers allowed to members of this group.
2. confluence-users: This is the default group for all new users. Permissions you assign to this group will be assigned to all newly created users.

View the comparison table.

Anonymous users

All users who don't log in when they access Confluence are considered 'anonymous'. You can grant anonymous users the 'Use Confluence' permission via the Global Permissions screen if you need to. This will allow non-registered users to access pages and spaces in Confluence. A space administrator can further control anonymous access per space via the space permissions.

Add or delete groups

To add a new group:

1. Choose the cog icon , then choose General Configuration under Confluence Administration
2. Choose Groups in the left-hand panel
3. Choose Add Group
4. Enter a name for your group and choose Save

You're now ready to start adding users to the group.

To delete a group:

1. Choose the cog icon , then choose General Configuration under Confluence Administration
2. Choose Groups in the left-hand panel
   You will see a list of all existing groups along with links to remove them.
3. Choose Delete next to the group you want to remove

Confluence Administrator permission vs confluence-admin group comparison

Granting the Confluence Administrator permission to someone allows them access to many, but not all, options in the administration console ( > General configuration). Expand the comparison table to view the options available to people granted the Confluence Administrator permission, and to those in the confluence-admin group.

Click to view the comparison table

Administration option	Confluence Admin permission	confluence-administrators group
CONFIGURATION
General Configuration
Further Configuration
Manage Referrers
Languages
Shortcut Links
Global Templates and Blueprints
Import Templates
Mail Servers
Recommended Updates Email
User Macros
In-app Notifications
HipChat Integration
Attachment Storage
Spam Prevention
PDF Export Language Support
Configure Code Macro
WebDAV Configuration
Office Connector
ATLASSIAN MARKETPLACE
Find new add-ons
Manage add-ons
Purchased add-ons
USERS & SECURITY
Users
Groups
Security Configuration
Global Permissions
Space Permissions
User Directories
Whitelist
LOOK AND FEEL
Themes
Color Scheme
Layouts
Stylesheet
Site Logo and Favicon
PDF Layout
PDF Stylesheet
Default Space Logo
		Custom HTML
ADMINISTRATION
System Information
Backup & Restore
Content Indexing
Mail Queue
Cache Management
Scheduled Jobs
License Details
Logging and Profiling
Thread Dump
Application Links
Application Navigator
Analytics
Import from Another Wiki
Atlassian Support Tools
Clustering

Notes

• Multiple user directories:
  You can define multiple user directories in Confluence, so that Confluence looks in more than one place for its users and groups. For example, you could use the default Confluence internal directory and connect to an LDAP directory server. In that case, you can define the directory order to determine where Confluence looks first when processing users and groups.

  Here is a summary of how the directory order affects the processing:

  • The order of the directories is the order in which they will be searched for users and groups.
  • Changes to users and groups will be made only in the first directory where the application has permission to make changes.

  See Managing Multiple Directories.