Confluence groups for administrators

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Grouping users in Confluence is a great way to cut down the work required when managing permissions and restrictions. 

Groups can be used when setting:

  • global permissions
  • space permissions
  • page restrictions. 

If your site has a lot of users, using groups can really simplify your permissions management over time. 

On this page:

Related pages:

Default groups

The two default groups in Confluence are:

  • confluence-users - this is the default group into which all new users are usually assigned. In most sites this is the group that provides the permission to log in to Confluence.
  • confluence-administrators – this super group grants the highest level of administrator permissions. Members of this can view all pages, including restricted pages. While they can't edit existing pages, they can add, delete, comment, restore page history, and administer the space. They can also access the admin console and perform all administrative tasks.

Create a new group

To add a new group:

  1. Go to Administration menu , then General Configuration. > Groups.
  2. Choose Add Group.
  3. Enter a name for your group and choose Save. Group names must be lower case.

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

Delete a group

To delete a group:

  1. Go to Administration menu , then General Configuration. > Groups.
  2. Choose Delete next to the group you want to remove. 

Deleting a group removes all permission restrictions associated with it. This means that members of this group may loose access to spaces that use this group to grant their permissions, and pages / blogs that are only only restricted to this group will become available to all confluence users. 

If you have Confluence Data Center, you can Inspect permissions to find out which spaces are using this group, before you delete it. 

Confluence-administrators super group

The Confluence administrator global permission and the confluence-administrators group are not related. Going by the names, you would think they are the same thing, but they're not. Granting a user or a group Confluence administrator global permission allows access to a sub-set of administrative functions. Granting membership to the confluence-administrators group grants the highest possible permissions, with complete access to all content and administration functions.

To find out more about what the various levels of administrator can do, see Global Permissions Overview

About 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.

Last modified on Jul 1, 2024

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