Atlassian Confluence 5 Essentials: Centralize all your organization's documentation in one place using Confluence. From installation to using add-ons, this is a complete, user-friendly tutorial that assumes virtually no prior knowledge.

Authentication in Confluence takes place at different levels within the application, for example, when retrieving information from the database or when displaying this information on a Confluence page. The technology that is used depends on the request made to Confluence or your configuration. The following are a few examples of authentication technologies.

There are a couple of options available for adding users to your Confluence installation. The options do not exclude each other so it's possible to use them all, depending on your installation and how open your Confluence should be to the outside world.

Manually adding users

As you are just getting started with Confluence, adding users manually is probably the way you want to go. Adding users is an option only available to Confluence administrators or system administrators.

To add a user, navigate to the Administration Console in Confluence (Administration | Confluence Admin) and select users from the left menu. As shown in the following screenshot, click on the Add Users tab:

While filling out the form there are a few things you have to keep in mind:

• The username must be lowercase and unique to Confluence. If your company has a username policy, it's best to use this in Confluence too. If there is no username policy, I like to use firstname.lastname as a standard, that is, arthur...

Groups are collections of users. A group can be used to successfully manage a large number of users. Administrators are allowed to create groups in Confluence and add users to these groups. Permissions are then assigned to groups instead of users to allow easier management.

There are two default groups already available in Confluence, and these are special groups:

We are now able to add users and groups to Confluence, and administer group memberships. There will be a point where we have to look up a user, change his or her details, or send a new password.

It is possible to enable a public signup for your Confluence site. People can then add their own usernames and log in to the site immediately.

If you want to restrict your site to a particular set of users, you may want to restrict the e-mail domains or disable public signup completely.

To enable or disable public signup:

The preceding screenshot shows us a couple of options.

We can enable or disable the public signup with a single checkbox. Enabling public signup also gives us the possibility to restrict the users' e-mail addresses to one or more domains.

A very useful feature is to notify administrators by e-mail when an account is created...

So far we have learned how to get users into our Confluence installation. This is very useful but what if your company has its own LDAP server or is already using some other Atlassian products, such as JIRA or Crowd?

Within Confluence we can configure one or more external user directories. A user directory is a place where you store information about users and groups, including some other user information. This information can be the person's full name, e-mail address, or department. When an external user directory is configured, Confluence will also use the directory to authenticate a user.

Confluence has support for the following external directories:

You can add as many external directories as you need. Note that you can change the order of the directories, determining which directory will search first.

In this chapter we have learned how we can add users to our Confluence installation. There are many options available, such as manually adding users, inviting users to sign up themselves, or having an open registration for users.

We have seen that if your company already has a user management system in place, Confluence can easily make use of that, either fully delegating authentication and authorization, or just partially.

Now that we have a running Confluence installation and have invited some users to use it, we are off to one of the most important parts of Confluence, creating content. In the next chapter we will go into how we can create engaging content with the Confluence editor.