📣 We’re giving you a personal space…automatically!

[Rodney Hughes]

@richard.lane 

Thanks for that explanation ... I had not heard GDPR interpreted to that extent before.

Also not a lawyer, but responsible for general User support for our instance so it intrigues me.

In the context of this "problem feature" roll out though, having a Personal Space, or not, and blocked admin rights or not, doesn't specifically change the amount of personal information that the User chooses to make available in the Confluence instance, and the User can always delete what they want to delete.  So I struggle to see where it suddenly is a platform host problem deleting stuff in a "locked" private Space - if the User asks for stuff to be deleted, they can do it themselves.

[Tim Brewer]

I have to add my voice to the host of people asking you not to do this! Activating this for every staff member will confuse our organisation greatly. People may start saving information to their space without IT knowing about it, and having a host of unused spaces will make managing our existing spaces much more difficult. Please make this an opt-in function!

[richard.lane]

@Rodney Hughes 

You're misunderstanding. Simple example:

1. Bill Smith is a customer of Telstra, and a British Citizen.
2. Bill Smith asks for all information Telstra holds on him
3. Jim Developer at Telstra copied some of Bill's data into his personal space to do testing (Bad Jim)
4. Telstra legal tell Telstra IT to search for the info they hold on Bill Smith.
5. IT miss the info in Jim Developer's personal Confluence and don't include it in the response to Bill.
6. Telstra just breached GDPR.

[richard.lane]

@Steven Drury 

For better or worse, some of us work in highly regulated industries, and we're required to control what our staff do or we can lose our licence to operate or wear potentially huge fines.

Lots of industries "guidance and guardrails" can work. For those of us that require "enforced rules" the "empower people to do whatever they want" Atlassian attitude is a real pain-point.

Lawyers and legislators don't do Agile.

[Karlis Vesters]

Please rollback and make it optional. It creates additional work to delete these spaces.

[Rodney Hughes]

@Avni Barman 

Come on Avni ... please respond.

You are the Product Manager

[John Fetzik]

Also adding my voice that this is a bad idea. Due to both company policies, contractual requirements, and government regulations, we need to maintain control of access, visibility, and retention of all the data in all of the applications we use.

[Benjamin Payet]

It sounds like a great feature. I'm looking forward to the activation of my personal space.

[Cameron Watson]

@Benjamin Payet Unless your Org has restricted access, you know you can have your own space already? This is about Confluence automatically giving everyone a space without choice.

[dave.drexler]

@Benjamin Payet- this is not a new feature. We already have the ability to allow users to create a personal space - that's been a feature for a long time.

This announcement is about Atlassian going into your instance of Confluence and creating personal spaces for your users - "automatically!" Creating personal spaces should be by-request, and needs to under the control of admins so we can steer the growth of our instances according to our organizations' needs.

[Benjamin Payet]

@Cameron Watson & @dave.drexler I didn't know about this feature and I may not be the only one. In my opinion, enabling personal spaces by default sounds like a good idea.

[Karlis Vesters]

@Benjamin Payet  why do think is good idea to create personal space in work account for persons who will not use their personal space? (persons who like to have personal space can create it with one click already)

May be you can share what kind of problem this is solving for you?

[dave.drexler]

Hi @Benjamin Payet - re: "enabling personal spaces by default sounds like a good idea."

IMHO, each instance admin should make that determination for their organization. In my experience (I've been using/admin'ing Confluence since 2007), it would have been a truly awful idea for any of the companies I've worked for to-date. But your mileage may vary, as they say.

It's almost always a bad idea for a vendor to make a change to the configuration and administration of enterprise software without giving the local admins a say.

[Benjamin Payet]

I don't see why would it would be so important to block users to have their personal spaces? 

On the other hand, if you deactivate it by default admins may forget to activate the option. It's what happened to me.

[Lenard Fudala]

@Benjamin Payet As others have explained in detail, some orgs have regulatory requirements and this is not about that.

This is about creating a space for every user that exists in the system, automatically, and filling the list of spaces and the server instance up with unused distractions. Personal spaces are already allowed by default. That setting has nothing to do with the notice you're commenting on.

[Matt Wasserman]

@Benjamin PayetThree reasons -

One, because Confluence isn't Facebook. We use it to store, share, and collaborate on documents people need to do their jobs. Not as a place where people can create and share content they find personally interesting.

Two, closely related to One, confronting users with what amounts to a user directory when they click "All Spaces" will make finding spaces they actually need much more difficult - verging on impossible in large organizations.

And Three, as has been pointed out multiple times in this comment section, document repos that we control but can't administer can easily result in violations of numerous laws and regulations.

If Atlassian wants to give us a separate Confluence instance where each of our users can post pictures of breakfast or bad poetry or whatever and, most importantly, we have no responsibility for the content posted, that's fine. But forcing us to clutter up our workspace with content we have no control over is bad on every level.

[Benjamin Payet]

@Matt Wasserman I got your points. Our companies' culture seems to be highly different and so is the way we manage our internal tools.

[dave.drexler]

Vive la difference!

Exactly! And that's why Atlassian should not be rolling this out to everyone.

[Avni Barman]

Thank you all for your detailed feedback and responses. I have gone ahead and addressed all concerns here. Please do not hesitate to let us know any other questions you might have!

[Jeff Hoover]

In other words, for those of us who allow our users to create Personal Spaces, you are still forcing this feature on us?  This is exactly what your user community is asking you not to do.

[Chase Whitener]

@Avni Barman I'm sorry, but that doesn't at all address our issue. You're not paying attention to the actual responses here. Please read our actual complaints.

We're asking you for a way to opt out of automatically assigning personal spaces to people, not to only be able to completely turn off the ability to have personal spaces.

We do not want this change or we want a way to opt out of this change.

What we want: for users to be able to create a personal space should they decide to do so. They already get this and it's super easy.

What we don't want: automatically created spaces for everyone regardless of if they have a reason to do so.

You haven't addressed that yet.

[Cameron Watson]

@Avni Barman I know your trying to put a positive spin on it but it just sounds like yourself and the team aren’t listening to the end users.

[Jeanne Howe]

This is madness

Once again Atlassian has NOT listened to a single piece of feed back from ANY of its users.

Turning off a users ability to create a personal space is NOT a resolution. Some customers would like the OPTION of allowing users to create a personal space without having these spaces created AUTOMATICALLY by ATLASSIAN.

If I wanted Atlassian to administer and support my instance of Confluence I'd assign you a user account and provide you with the appropriate permissions. Short of that, stay out. You are not our admin and do not have permissions to create spaces without our consent.

Please stop this.

[Rodney Hughes]

[Edited for Rules of Engagement violations]

@Avni Barman 

As requested .. we are letting you know about our "concerns" ... https://tinyurl.com/fcjh828z 

Your "revised new system" is STILL not what we want!

The problem in the original new system or your latest revised new system is that you have decided that new Users get a Space AUTOMATICALLY

Our complaint is not about Admins being able to delete .. or even not allow personal Spaces ...!!!

THAT DOES CREATE PROBELEMS FOR US.

The old system was fine!

"If it isn't broken, don't fix it"

Leave it as it was.

[Mark Thompson]

Let's give @Avni Barman  a break.  Atlassian is going to have to discuss internally.  Hold the vehement responses until someone comes back and says they're releasing it anyway.  At that point I'll be right there with you.  I know we get frustrated but maybe they'll listen.  The response here seemed pretty clear.