Best Practices for Knowledge Base Page Owners

[Justine]

We are in the process of implementing an automated approach in our Service Desk Knowledge Base space to notify page owners when a page has been inactive for a certain period of time. The automation rule behind this approach would also create a ticket (with a link to the page in question) and assign to the page owner to review inactive page either for updates (if still relevant) or determine if page should be archived and/or deleted. 

In our environment, the majority of KB articles were created by one or two Helpdesk team members. These articles are largely application-specific (how-to and troubleshooting content). In many cases, the page creator was the person who initially worked through an issue on a ticket or call, identified the resolution, and documented it for future reference. However, that person is not necessarily the long-term technical owner or primary contact for the application itself. 

This is where I'm stuck. What is the best practice around page ownership in a Confluence Knowledge Base space? Should pages be reassigned after creation to the app owner?

Our goal is to ensure that KB content remains accurate, actively maintained, and relevant over time. We don't want to place the responsibility of that solely on one or two individuals simply because they created the original content. 

Curious how others have navigated this situation. What is best practice and/or what works well for other organizations? 

Update: For clarity, I already have automation rules in place and understand how to configure all of that - this is more to understand how others are assigning (or reassigning) page owners and who the page should fall under in terms of reviewing and updating every couple of years, if that makes sense. 

[Jamie Esker _Appfire_]

Hi @Justine! I'll share some of my knowledge here. Atlassian provides some helpful automations with tasks like these. You can set up an automation to notify selected users when pages reach a certain age. This could be a trigger that they need reviewed or archived. You can also automatically archive them via label, status change, or other actions.

I haven't played around with the ownership transfer as much, but there are some options in there, like, transfer ownership upon publishing, account deactivation, etc.   

If you want a more scalable option, there are apps like Comala Document Management, which provides automated workflows for tasks like these. Full disclosure, I am the PMM that owns this app at Appfire, so I'm a little biased. 

You can manage workflows at the global level and define workflow variables per workflow or page, which makes maintaining workflows much easier, especially if several people need to be included. 

For example, you can set an expiration date per process, all on one workflow. That will trigger a review status, which notifies the right stakeholders. Once you they review, they can either update the document, sending it back through the approval process. Or it can be automatically archived via a label and integration with Confluence automation. 

Feel free to reach out to our team if you'd like a demo, but I hope the suggested automations can get you started!