Confluence

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Confluence and Ownership

Confluence is never going to offer ownership tracking itself

See lots of angry people about the lack of ability to readily reassign ownership here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-7247

(also on several linked tickets)

Confluence response is

We understand that for many of you, there is a close correlation between author and page ownership. With that in mind, we unfortunately don’t see ourselves working on this issue within the near future, but do have a several workarounds for the issues you’ve described:

1. Displaying a page owner - we recommend using an info macro or table labelled “page owner” and tagging the relevant user. For more complex applications, Comala Workflows offers alternative solutions.

2. Deleting a previous employee's account (which is tied to existing pages) - we do not recommend you delete users from Confluence, as that would complicate your database (e.g. deletion of the user’s previous comments) but you can[ deactivate previous user accounts|https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/delete-or-disable-users-138318.html] for security purposes and still keep track of the pages they’ve worked on. Deactivating a user ensures they no longer count towards your license tier.

3. Redirecting notifications to the page owner - notifications are handled through watching the page. If you no longer want to receive notifications, you can unwatch the page and have the new page owner start watching it to receive the relevant notifications.

4. Finally, you can also change a page creator through the database. We recommend retaining an instance of your previous DB and doing this with a DBA present.

So Confluence will never support using Author to indicate ownership.

What we might be able to do about this

One alternative is to put some structured info on the page (1 above) - but this then can't readily be searched inside page trees via Confluence itself

There are many Confluence Apps that aim to fill the gap. Examples include:

Confluence seem to be leaving this kind of concern up to the third-party app marketplace rather than trying to meet it themselves.

Alternative paths we could follow include:

  • Try a third-party plug in
  • Try writing our own plug in (something the Jane Street writer-in-residence might be good at, for instance)
  • Try something minimal - a consistent way of marking up pages that Confluence search can catch (labels?) but this won't work well with labelling page trees
  • Try organising ownership by spaces rather than page trees - but this seems insufficiently granular
  • Manage ownership by something external to Confluence

Confluence and Discoverability

Some pages on this to read and harvest insights from, although everyone is trying to sell you something here:

Things to include:

  • label coherence
  • retiring old stuff
  • ???

Also need to research the search engine a bit and see what we could do there.

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