Understanding view and add page permissions in Confluence

Confluence spaces use simple permissions to control access and editing. View permission allows a user to find and open a space’s pages and content. Without this permission, the user won’t see the space at all. Add Page permission allows you to create and edit pages in that space, including adding or updating Confluence pages or child pages, whiteboards, and live pages. In effect, View permission determines who can access spaces, and Add Page permission determines who can edit them. If a user lacks the View permission, content in that space is hidden. Without the Add Page permission, a user can only view content, not create or edit it.

How Smart Courses inherits Confluence permissions

Smart Courses LMS inherits the Confluence permission model. In the cloud, course visibility follows space View permissions: anyone who can view a space can view its courses. Similarly, if a user has the “Add Page” permission in a space, they can create a new course there (they’ll see the “New Course” button). Smart Courses also offers course-level restrictions, allowing a course to be limited to specific groups or users, granting exclusive access to those named. In summary, Smart Courses content resides in Confluence spaces and adheres to the same View/Add Page rights as any other page, ensuring consistent course access and creation in accordance with Confluence’s own access rules.

How permissions shape the learning experience in Confluence

Permissions directly shape what learners and instructors see. Over-restricting View rights can hide valuable training: if a team lacks View permission on a space, its members will never know those courses exist. Conversely, Smart Courses’ restrictions can “hide” courses by hiding them from most users or risk exposing too much content. Properly mapping permissions, however, facilitates learning: teams that use their department space see only their relevant courses, and employees only see training meant for their role. In short, View/Add Page rights determine who can access and create content. A thoughtful permission scheme ensures that learners find the right courses while only instructors and administrators receive course-creation rights.

Global vs Space level course Catalogs: What’s the difference?

Smart Courses offers two catalog views: a global catalog and a space-level catalog. The global catalog (from the Apps menu) aggregates all courses the user has access to across the site( different spaces). Each space also has a space catalog (accessible via a “Courses” entry in that space’s sidebar), which displays only the courses created on that space. Administrators can even disable global courses, forcing every new course to belong to a specific space. This flexibility lets an organization choose between a site-wide learning hub (with global courses) or strictly space-bound course libraries.

Global catalog configuration

Global catalog settings are managed by Smart Courses admins. They can:

• Set the default sort order of courses and pin featured courses.
• Choose which metadata appears on course cards (such as creator name, attendee count, or space name).
• Enable or disable filter panels (e.g., by Difficulty, Categories, Labels, Contributors).
• Define default certificate templates and assignment rules.
• Insights permissions: Control who can access Smart Courses analytics

These global configurations enable administrators to consistently brand and organize the catalog across the site, providing learners with a uniform experience.

Space-level catalog configuration

Space admins can override certain configurations for their space:

• Comments: Enable or disable comments on courses within the space.
• Multi-language support: Turn on or off multi-language courses for that space.
• Certificates: Revert any customized certificate to the global default, or use space-specific ones.
• Space catalog branding: Most organizational settings (such as categories or difficulty levels) are defined globally. Space-level settings enable teams to tailor minor features (such as comments and certificates) to their specific needs without affecting other spaces.

Space admins and catalog management

Each space’s admin fully manages that space’s course catalog. A space admin can:

• Grant or revoke Add Page (course-creation) rights to users or groups in the space.
• Control which Confluence groups have View/Add permissions (thus governing who can see or create courses).
• Configure the space’s catalog filters and branding.
• (If they have Add Page rights) Create courses directly from the space’s catalog page.

In practice, this means each team “owns” its training hub. When a user clicks the Courses entry in a space, they see only that space’s courses. The space admin ensures that the right users have view and add rights, and can curate the course catalog for their team. Meanwhile, global admins oversee settings that affect the entire site.

Real-World Use Cases: Permission Strategies across 3 companies

Company A: Department-based access

Each department HR, Sales, Marketing) has its own Confluence space. Team members are only granted access to their respective department’s space. As a result:

• Learners only see relevant training
• Content is siloed but organized
• Each department owns and controls its catalog

Company B: Project-based cross-functional access

Spaces are organized around projects rather than departments. For example:

• Project 1: Sales, Marketing, Design
• Project 2: Operations, Quality
• Project 3: Sales, Operations, Marketing

Users are granted access to the spaces for the projects in which they’re involved. Smart Courses restrictions are used to fine-tune access to specific content. Course contributors and editors are defined per course, allowing precise control over who can view and edit.

Company C: complex shared spaces with guest and anonymous access

This setup includes a mix of:

• Spaces are restricted to specific internal groups
• Spaces shared by multiple groups
• Publicly accessible spaces

Public spaces can be opened to:

• All internal users
• Guest users (e.g., external collaborators)
• Anonymous users (if enabled)

This model is ideal for organizations that offer public training or work with external stakeholders. Permissions must be carefully audited to ensure both security and accessibility.

Best practices for managing permissions

• Map audiences to Confluence groups: Use role-based groups to manage space access more easily.
• Use space-level catalogs for decentralized ownership: Let each team or department manage its content.
• Restrict sensitive content: Utilize Smart Courses restrictions for confidential training, such as audits or leadership materials.
• Plan roles with a clear matrix: Define who can create, edit, and analyze courses based on job functions.
• Audit guest and anonymous access regularly: Review permissions frequently to avoid unintentional data exposure

Where does your HR team currently track employee goals, feedback, and performance updates? If you’re using Confluence, you’re already heading in the right direction. If not, now’s the perfect time to rethink how your team collaborates.

The benefits of using Confluence for centralized HR performance management

Confluence isn’t just a corporate wiki; it’s a powerful hub for HR teams to centralize documentation, streamline feedback, and build a culture of transparency.

From structured data to rich text collaboration, Confluence provides an intuitive workspace where performance conversations are easily documented, updated, and shared across departments.

And here’s where it gets even more powerful: Confluence transforms into a dynamic, data driven HR performance platform when you add Smart Tables into the mix. You can filter, calculate, and visualize performance data all without leaving the page.

With Smart Tables for Confluence, tracking employee performance becomes real-time, automated, and collaborative.

How to track employee performance in real-time using Confluence & Smart Tables

HR teams handle multiple tasks, from recruitment to performance reviews to goal tracking. Smart Tables for Confluence simplify performance management by creating dynamic, real-time tables that track progress, update scores, and centralize feedback all within the same platform.

With Smart Tables for Confluence, HR managers can:

• Centralized performance data: Keep everything in one place, easily accessible to managers and employees.

• Track KPIs in real-time: No more outdated reports; performance data is always current.
• Automate calculations: One click to apply formulas for your table

• Enhance collaboration: Team leads, HR managers, and department Leads can instantly access and update performance data.

Excel-Like Calculations

Performance tracking often requires complex calculations. Instead of using external spreadsheets, Smart Tables bring Excel-like functions (SUM, AVERAGE, IF, COUNTIF) directly into Confluence. HR teams can instantly calculate performance scores, bonus eligibility, and goal achievements, making decisions faster and easier.

With Smart Tables for Confluence, HR managers can perform:

• Performance score calculations: Use SUM, AVERAGE, IF, and COUNTIF to automate employee ratings.
• Bonus & salary adjustments: Instantly calculate bonus eligibility based on performance metrics.
• Team productivity trends: Track and compare performance over time within Confluence.

No need to export data to Excel, Smart Tables allow HR teams to calculate everything inside Confluence, saving hours of work each week.

Advanced filtering

Large organizations generate vast amounts of HR data.

Smart Tables’ advanced filtering helps HR teams drill down into specific metrics by department, role, or performance criteria.

This enables quick identification of top performers, areas for improvement, and emerging trends, ensuring accurate data always backs HR decisions.
HR teams deal with massive amounts of employee performance data. Finding relevant insights in this sea of numbers can be overwhelming.

Smart Tables simplify this by allowing advanced filtering, so HR teams can quickly:

• Filter by department: View performance only for specific teams.
• Sort by time period: Track improvements over months or years.
• Identify top & low performers: Instantly see who’s excelling and who needs coaching.

Instead of digging through endless spreadsheets, HR managers can pinpoint key insights in seconds, leading to faster and more accurate decision-making.

Visualizing employee performance with charts and graphs

Data visualization is crucial for presenting complex performance metrics.

Smart Tables allow HR teams to create automated charts and graphs, bar charts for team performance, line graphs for individual progress, and pie charts for KPI distributions.

These visual insights make trends easy to understand and communicate to leadership.

With Smart Tables for Confluence, HR teams can:

• Create bar charts: Compare performance scores across teams.
• Use line graphs: Track employee progress over time.
• Generate pie charts: Break down performance distribution at a glance.

These visual tools make HR reports more engaging and help leadership make data-driven decisions faster.

Transform HR performance tracking with Smart Tables for Confluence

HR teams need smarter, faster, and more collaborative ways to track performance. Smart Tables and Confluence provide the perfect solution, offering:

• Real-time performance tracking
• Automated calculations & data filtering
• Interactive charts & visual reports
• Seamless collaboration across HR teams

By converting Confluence tables into dynamic Smart Tables, HR managers can save time, eliminate errors, and make performance tracking effortless.

In this blog post, we’ll acknowledge the five essential features of Smart Terms that will make your work life a breeze.

1/ Global glossaries

Ranking top 1 is the glossary globalization feature.

“How can I make a glossary global?” is the most asked question from our clients.

Consistent terminology throughout Confluence spaces (departments) is essential to have everyone speak the same language and stay on the same page.

The first globalization option is “Enable global glossaries,” which highlights specific space glossaries across all spaces in Confluence to ensure consistency across all departments.

The second option, “Enable the option to make individual terms global,” gives you even more control by adding granularity to the glossary and making only important terminology (terms) shared across your organization.

Important to note: Globalizing glossaries doesn’t mean duplicating terms in all spaces. Only the highlight of terms on Confluence pages will be global across all spaces.

2/ Include & exclude terms of specific spaces

Smart Terms for Confluence offers two powerful options to help you fine-tune your glossary management.

The first option, “Include terms of these spaces,” allows you to choose specific glossaries you want to highlight in the current glossary without duplicating them.

e.g., If you are currently in the “Marketing Space” and want to include the “HR Space” glossary, ” to be highlighted in the current space.

Whenever a term from the “HR Space glossary” is added to a Confluence page in the “Marketing Space,” it will be highlighted automatically.

The second option, “Exclude terms of these spaces,” is generally used to exclude certain globalized spaces from being highlighted in a specific space.

e.g., You created a glossary in the “Global Terms” Space and configured the settings to highlight that glossary in all spaces. One space that’s not relevant is the “Privacy & Terms.”

To avoid confusion, you must exclude the “Global Terms” space from being highlighted in the “Privacy & Terms” Space from the space settings.

3/ Multi-language support

You’re working for a company and leading a project that requires close collaboration between team members in different countries, with different languages and different time zones?

Struggling to keep everyone on the same page?

You can count on Smart Terms‘ multi-language support that makes breaking down language barriers easier.

Create glossaries in more than 23 languages to improve communication across teams spread across borders.

Smart Terms for Confluence even provides extensive highlighting options allowing you to highlight terms in the user language and all translations simultaneously.

Check this blog post to learn more about creating a multi-language glossary.

4/ Disable the highlight feature on a specific Confluence page

Highlighting terms on Confluence pages can be a game-changer for collaboration and organization. But what if you don’t need the highlight on a specific page only?

No worries! You don’t have to disable the highlight for the whole space. A few clicks can disable the highlight feature on that specific Confluence page.

5/ Terms list macro

If you’re a Smart Terms user and haven’t used this macro yet, It’s that time!

The Terms list macro is a few clicks away from bringing a space glossary to a Confluence page. If you’re using Confluence pages as a reference for a knowledge base or for onboarding customers and newbies, the terms list macro would be the ideal option to organize and display important terms and concepts.

On Confluence Cloud, it’s possible to implement multiple glossaries from different spaces on a Confluence page, and the criteria used to filter the list of terms is Confluence labels.

Terms list macro best practice: Attach appropriate labels to each term to easily implement them into the list.

In a competitive environment, defining and understanding terms correctly may be your first step to success.

Misinterpreting words and misunderstanding terms can distort the meaning of information and increase the risk of inadequate decisions.

These bad decisions, in most cases, lead to high-cost mistakes that impact the departments yet company’s performance.

Why implement a company glossary? 

We all have our own assumptions about what certain words mean, based on our past experience, professional or personal. But is this a real problem? Usually, the answer is yes. So, what is the reason behind it? Simply because when you think you know what a “KB” is, you are never sure it really is. Does it stand for kiloByte or Knowledge base? And here, comes the magic of the company glossary; it provides a common understanding of the meaning and proper use of words and terms and even its related vocabulary.

A glossary allows coherent communication between all teams’ members. And in some other cases, it enhances a fluent understanding, even between an organization and its third-party stakeholders.

Let’s take this acronym as an example:
SLA means for an IT geek, Service Level Agreement, whereas it means Second Language Acquisition for an HR specialist.
Imagine being using a joint company repository where all team members from different departments have access to it; this will mix-up the real meaning of information. 
By using a terminology glossary, it becomes possible to define the scope of use of a specific term clearly.

 

Why is it essential to create a glossary for your Confluence pages?

 

Confluence helps teams collaborate and share knowledge effectively through spaces, pages, and content.

Confluence users can easily collaborate: create, edit, comment, share, and even co-create content together via the same interface. Simply, Confluence is your corporate Wiki (What I Know Is).

Confluence has a wide range of features that can be extended by using add-ons or integrating other apps. Integrate it with a glossary app can take your team’s communication and collaboration to the next level: less misinterpreting, prevent communication gaps, strengthen the transfer of information.

What app to use as a company glossary for Confluence? 

Connect the dots across your terms! This is how we describe Smart Terms glossary for Confluence.
Smart Terms allows creating enriched definitions: related vocabulary (synonym, acronym,…) and media ( images, videos, and even audio). You can set your company terminology across pages, space, or all spaces of your Wiki using the highlight option.
Smart Terms is available on Cloud, Server, and Data Center.

In our next blog post, we will present all the incredible features of Smart Terms and how to use them.