Outdated page notification via Slack

[Dave Lines]

Hi - I have an automation set up to send an email to the page author when a page has not been updated in over a year. However, my colleagues don't really pay attention to email, so I would like to send the page author a notification in Slack as well. Any ideas for how to do that? Thanks in advance for your help!

[Antonio Rodríguez _Deiser_ · Accepted solution]

Hi Dave,

This is a great use case, and the good news is: yes, you can absolutely send Slack notifications — although it requires a small extra setup using either Slack webhooks or a third-party connector like Zapier or Automate.io.

Here’s how to do it with a Slack Incoming Webhook and an automation rule in Confluence Cloud:

1. Create a Slack Incoming Webhook

   • Go to https://api.slack.com/apps

   • Create a new app → Add Incoming Webhooks feature

   • Activate it and configure the target Slack channel (you can use @User mentions too)

   • Copy the generated webhook URL

2. In your Confluence Automation rule:

   • Add a new "Send web request" action

   • Paste the webhook URL

   • Set method to POST

   • Format the payload

There are also several ways to do it without coding. This is using tools as Zapier. 

Hope this helps! Let me know if you want help setting up the webhook payload or finding a workaround for user identification.
If this answer worked, feel free to mark it as accepted so others can find it too 😊

[Dave Lines]

Hi Antonio - thanks for your response. I'm wondering if there is a way for the automation to know which Slack user to send the notification to based on the owner (or author) of the page?

[Antonio Rodríguez _Deiser_]

Hey!

Great question and yep, that’s the tricky part!

Out of the box, Confluence automation doesn’t automatically map authors to Slack users, since it doesn’t “know” which Slack handle belongs to which Confluence user.

BUT here are a few ways people usually solve this:

1. Manual mapping

 You can add a lookup table inside your rule (or in a Google Sheet or JSON object) with something like:

 {
"alice@example.com": "@alice-slack",
"bob@example.com": "@bobby"
}

And then use smart values to match the page author's email to the Slack handle.

2. No-code tools

You can use back again zapier to:

* Send the page author's email in a webhook to Zapier or a small custom service

* That service looks up the Slack user ID (using Slack API)

* Then sends the message

Let me know what setup you're working with — happy to help think through the best path 😊

[Dave Lines]

Thanks, @Antonio Rodríguez _Deiser_. Both of those solutions are a little above my skill level, so I think I'll just share a list of pages in a general Slack channel.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Dave Lines Why do you think that a different channel (Slack vs. email) will lead to better results?

I would even ask your users, what is the problem with the emails?

[Dave Lines]

No problem with emails, but as is the case with many organizations our users pay more attention to Slack than email. So we want them to get the notifications in two places.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

I see.

If you want to a bit more control over how your emails look, what they contain and such, consider using the Better Content Archiving app. You can totally customize its email notifications by configuring when those are sent, what pages they contain, how the subject and body looks and who are the recipients.

You can even control what the "outdated" status means and choose owners for your pages and even page trees.

In general, if you reduce the volume of the emails and send out more relevant emails (instead of email bombing your users with irrelevant page lists), it will increase the adoption.

See this blog post

(Discl. this is a paid and supported app developed by our team. Free for 10 users!)