Private Parts for Atlassian Confluence

Supports Confluence 5.4+

Suppressing private usernames for external Wikis with restricted spaces.

Documentation

Assumptions
Installing it
What should you expect?
Uninstall
What's New in Version 2?
- Expected Configurations
Migration from version 1.x

Assumptions

This plugin is often desired by Confluence administrators that are are managing an external users.

We assume:

that you wish to suppress the visibility of network usernames, in collaboration features like @mentions, username searches, or Sharebox - and other related areas of Confluence wiki.
that you will try this out on a staging system before a production system, first, given the impacted user profile visibility.
that you will notify your end users upon installing this plugin, to avoid unnecessary confusions about the loss of user name-search visibility.

If you have questions about this use case and would like to discuss it, do not hesitate to reach out to us and happy to discuss.

Installing it

Follow these steps:

Download the AppFusions add-on from here: http://www.appfusions.com/display/PPARTS/Downloads+and+Notes
Go to your Confluence admin panel
Click on "Manage Add-Ons" in left-most menu.
In upper-right, click on "Upload add-on"
In the Upload Add-on dialog, select the downloaded add-on file to be uploaded to Confluence.
Click on "Private Parts in Confluence" in the AppFusions Add-Ons left panel.
Copy in your AppFusions provided license - no white spaces.

What should you expect?

With this plugin, out of the box features are controlled as follows:

@mention lookups are suppressed - so you can't see anyone.
"Share" feature works by email address or groups only
People Directory menu item is suppressed (so you can't see people you shouldn't see)
Since @mention look up is disabled, if you do an @ref in a personal task, it will NOT list the task
Disabled "search filter by author"
Removed hover cards - over a person
Removed follow/unfollow capability
Remove Network tab on Dashboard and user profile

If you have comments on this feature set, please do not hesitate to provide us with feedback.

We anticipate that we will make the "features" controllable by an administrators configuration panel (i.e., turn on/off per feature), in future releases.

Uninstall

To successfully remove Private Parts for Confluence from your system:

uninstall the plugin
perform a full search index rebuild (to restore the user profile information) – failure to reindex will mean only new users will appear in the search.

What's New in Version 2?

Private Parts for Confluence version 2 enables visibility of user information and user profiles based on 3 new permission sets configured against Confluence groups.

Group-based Permissions:

View All – Users who are members of groups who can view all user information (recommended for members of confluence-administrators)
View None – Users who are members of groups who can view no user information (recommended for partner groups).
View By Membership – Users who are members of groups which can only view user information for members of groups which they are themselves also members

View All permission is tested first, followed by View None permission. All users who do not fit into theses permissions are assigned View By Membership permission

Exceptions - Do Not Check Membership

This is a special category that allows you to skip membership checking for certain groups.

If this is left blank, all users will effectively have the View All permission as all users are members of the confluence-users group be default.

Expected Configurations

Some use cases:

Name	View All Permission	View None Permission	Exceptions	Explanation
Open access/Not configured	none	none	none	By default, the `confluence-users` group (of which all users are members) will have the View By Membership permission, so all users will be able to see each other.
Hide user information	none	`confluence-users`	none	All users cannot view any user information
Partners Portal	`my-company-users`	`partner-x-users`, `partner-y-users`	`confluence-users`	`my-company-users` members will be able to view all user information. `partner-x-users`, `partner-y-users` members cannot view any user information. Each new partner group would require adding to the View None permission unless there is an `all-partners` group which could be used instead. All other groups (such as `partner-z-users` ) would have the View By Membership permission, so will be able to view user information for members of groups which they are themselves also members. Membership of `confluence-users` is ignored when checking permissions.
Shared Group Membership	none	none	`confluence-users`	No one can view all other users. No one can view no other users. Membership of the `confluence-users` group is ignored. All other groups (i.e. everybody) would have the View By Membership permission, so will be able to view user information for members of groups which they are themselves also members.

Migration from version 1.x

Version 2 of Private Parts is entirely different from version 1. In version1, all user profiles were removed from view. This was achieved by a combination of removing access to pages and functionality such as the Confluence Mentions plugin, and removing information from the search index.

In version 2, a slightly different approach has been taken. All information has been retained in the search index, but access to the data has been restricted in other ways. As a result of this, migration from the previous bversion requires a little manual intervention:

Steps:

Uninstall Private Parts for Confluence version 1.x
Re-enable the Confluence Mentions Plugin – search for it in Confluence Admin | Manage add-ons and select System from the dropdown menu:
Rebuild the Confluence index in Confluence Admin | Search Indexes:
Install Private Parts for Confluence version 2
Add the License
Configure the add-on

After that you should be all set!