Approvals in Confluence, now on Open Beta

[Cassandra Rinker]

From testing and what I've gathered in these comments, this feature only applies to new pages, and there's no way to apply this approval gate to edits on existing pages? If so, this doesn't help us with maintenance through the entire knowledge lifecycle. Our use case: Our customer-facing pages have to meet certain guidelines, and we want to allow SMEs to edit customer-facing content but have this approval layer in between their edits going live. We rarely have SMEs writing pages from scratch. 

[Linda Wu]

@Josue Paniagua Varela - thanks for sharing your use case on due date recurring reminder intervals! I can see why a single reminder before the due date may not be enough for time-sensitive reviews and shared this as product feedback for the team.

@Jason Krewson - today approvals are available on Confluence Premium and Enterprise only. We don’t have an update to share on Standard availability, but the team is tracking that feedback from customers in this thread. If that changes, the support documentation and release notes will be updated first.

@Cassandra Rinker - you're correct in that “require approval before publishing” gate currently applies to new pages, not edits to an already published page. We’ve heard similar lifecycle and compliance feedback from other teams in the beta, especially for controlled knowledge that needs review before updates go live. Thanks for calling out the SME-maintenance use case; we are planning to extend the publishing gate to subsequent edits beyond new pages' first drafts. This will be available in an upcoming release - stay tuned!

[Linda Wu]

@Shawn Stevens - thank you for the detailed write-up. Feedback submitted through the in-product mechanism reaches the same team, so no worries either way! To address your feedback:

1. Rovo Chat publishing - I've logged this issue with the team. We will look into creating a more seamless experience with Rovo Chat. A publish that cannot proceed should tell you an approval is required, rather than failing with a generic reload error.

2. Publishing elsewhere and moving the page - thanks for flagging this. Approval is currently evaluated at the point of publish, so a page that has already been published isn't re-evaluated when it's moved into a space that requires approval. I've raised this issue with the dev team as well.

3. Requiring one of two approvers - yes currently we are requiring a unanimous approval. All named approvers must approve. A quorum option has been raised by others in this thread as well, and it's logged with the product team.

4. The second approver not being notified - as you mentioned, it's worth checking that person's personal notification settings first. If notifications are enabled for them and the email still doesn't arrive, let me know and we'll look into it.

On the automation route: if you have some specific use cases you want to share, we can look into it further. We have planned to add some automation triggers and actions that may be helpful. I'll also tag @Cadence Hsu as the Product Manager who is leading this effort.

[Farah Idayu Othman]

Hi Alli Shea,

It's awesome to have this new Confluence feature!

I have one piece of feedback:

It would be worth clarifying how Approvals interacts with page restrictions. Specifically, approvers without edit access should still be able to submit their approval response when a page is under review. This feels like an important gap to address to ensure the approval flow isn't blocked by existing permission settings.

[Farah Idayu Othman]

Hi @Alli Shea ,

I have one question about expiry and re-approval.

When an approval expires and a content owner triggers a re-approval, does the page automatically revert to "In Review" status, or does someone need to initiate it again manually?

Thank you!