Select multiple users for Restrictions and a way way to populate Confluence's group/user account information from an external source

Situation: (my customer stated the following) I need to establish some user groups to support information access control at the page level. In other words, I want to use the view and edit permission on each page to control who sees and changes the pages. To do that I need three distinct user groups.

<space name> Council
<space name> Technical
<space name> Country

Note that we already have the <space name>-administrators group.

I then need to be able to populate them with appropriate people.

Issue: As space admins can't add Confluence users and groups directly (only people in the Confluence-administrators group can or users can sign up). With that, we see that the space admin's options are:

Option #1 - The confluence-administrator can create the 3 groups as described above and assign new or existing users to them. This is not a feasible solution for the confluence administrators as it creates too much admin work. Please advise if there is a way to populate Confluence's group/user account information from an external source ? A xml file or sql (how to add password as it is hashed) ? We would like to refer all space-related admin work to space admins rather than the Confluence administrators. Question: Although the LDAP integration has been improved in Confluence version 2.1, don't we still have to create user accounts in Confluence to match LDAP ? If so, using LDAP still doesn't resolve the situation described above.

Option #2 - The confluence-administrator will not create the 3 groups. The space admin will ask people to sign up first so he/she can assign individual users the appropriate permissions (this is being done today by the space admins).

Since option #2 relies on user accounts (vs. group accounts), we would like to request that you add the capability so we could select multiple users for Restrictions. Currently, only one single user (myself) and multiple groups can be selected.

Thanks.

Cathy Ran
The Boeing Company