Is it possible to make the status of a Confluence page mandatory?

[Simon Sahli]

We want to use the built-in status feature with Confluence more:
Add a status to your page or blog | Confluence Cloud | Atlassian Support

We have setup the needed statuses, which we want to have and also activated them on the spaces where they are relevant.
However, it is quite hard to get users to actually think about setting theses statuses whenever they edit a page.
We were therefore wondering if it is possible to make it mandatory to set these statuses, whenever you edit and publish a page?
Or at least inform them somehow that they should consider setting the page status when they are in the "edit" mode?

We do have Confluence Standard, so we won´t really have the automation functionality available, but if it would be possible to find a solution with the Confluence automation feature then still let me know, so we might could consider moving to Confluence premium.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Simon

[Levente Szabo _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Simon Sahli 

I know you mentioned you want to use the built-in status for your use case more, but I want to mention that some Confluence users saved money by staying on Standard and using the automatic page status feature of Better Content Archiving.

Making a status "mandatory" is not possible with Automation for Confluence either, it just helps you set the built-in 5 statuses automatically in some scenarios. It's not enforcing the status, but avoids the problem of users forgetting to manage the lifecycle of pages. By the way, it is very common, which is why we at Midori think that over a certain team size automatic page status refreshing is a must.

Also, you could remind page editors and creators with notifications, but Automation for Confluence will send 1 email per page. If someone edits many pages in a day, they will be flooded with emails. There is also a better, dedicated way to send scheduled reminder email with page lists with Better Content Archiving.

Here is a hands-on guide if you want to learn how to send better Confluence notifications or a tutorial video for automatic page statuses to try for your use case.

(Please note that Better Content Archiving is a free/paid, supported app and I'm part of the team developing it.)

[Simon Sahli]

Hi @Levente Szabo _Midori_

thanks for your recommendation.

So with your tool it would be easier, or better customizable, to create notifications to remind Confluence users to set or update the page status, correct?

However, is it also possible with your app to force people to set a status, when they create a new page, or update an existing page that does not have a status yet?

Cheers,
Simon

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

Hi @Simon Sahli 

Yes, you can build smart CQL queries that return pages that you want to send in a notification. For example, pages that haven't been edited for 90 days, haven't been viewed for 30 days, pages that haven't changed status for a while, etc. Then include those pages in a notification sent to the last modifier, creator, owner, etc.

In other words, you can automate the classification of pages and the status refreshing. It will refresh statuses, rather than "enforce" users to do it. Basically, it will do what it can for them.

You also point out an important limitation in Confluence, which is checking for empty values in CQL. This is missing from Confluence Cloud. This means that while updating statuses based on your rules is possible, you can't write a CQL that checks if a page doesn't have any status yet, and updates that.

But, again, you could do something like "update the status of all pages created in the last 24 hours" and initialize a status to those. This could be a viable workaround that we could help you with.

We also requested Atlassian to fix this shortcoming, please vote and comment on this feature request so can further improve the capabilities of Better Content Archiving for Confluence.

[Simon Sahli]

Hi @Levente Szabo _Midori_

got it, your described scenarios would for sure already improve the current situation.

I will check with the internal stakeholders and managers if your app, also considering the cost of course, would be something we should consider using.

If the outcome of this evaluation is positive then I will try out your app in the trial period and set up and test some of the mentioned things myself (and perhaps contact you or your team).

Thanks for answering my questions!

/Simon