Page Owner and Review date on Conflunce page

[Mattias Kallvi]

Hi,

I'm quite new to Confluence so this might be an easy question. I wonder if it's possible to set properties to a page like:

• Page Owner
• Review date

When Review date closes in I would like to send a notification to Page Owner.

It feels like something that should be easy to do but I just can't figure out how to do it. Hope someone can give me some suggestions.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

Confluence Cloud out of the box offers a limited "owner" concept. There is basically one owner per page, which defaults to the original creator of the page, but can be changed later. At the same time, there is no "review date" available using the built-in features.

Our Better Content Archiving app offers a more advanced "owner" concept:

• You can have zero, one or multiple owners per page or blog post.
• You can also have inheritance if someone owns a whole tree of pages.

See the comparison here.

Although the app is a full-blown content lifecycle management app, you can use only parts of this with great success. Related to your use case, the app supports these:

• set the owner
• set the expiration date (per page or even for a whole tree of pages!)
• automatically refreshing the status (and change it from "Up-to-date" to "Expired" on the expiration date or e.g. N days after its last update)
• automatically sending notifications to the owners (and other recipients)

You can, of course, rename the status from "Expired" to "To review" if that's your preferred terminology.

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

[Mattias Kallvi]

Thanks! Looks great, will definitely look into this.

[Brandi Guess]

the action being done here will actually cause the last updated date to change to the date that this action was taken:

• automatically refreshing the status (and change it from "Up-to-date" to "Expired" on the expiration date or e.g. N days after its last update)

This can be an issue because now the page is no longer displaying the date that a real "meaningful" update has been made. this is something to consider when creating your workflow for page health.  

This app is of course on my radar, I does a lot of really cool things. But not something I would ever be able to convince my employer to get.  

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Hmmm.

Actually, the Better Content Archiving app will not change the timestamp of the last "real, meaningful update" on the page or blog post! As the app manages its own status and does not rely on the built-in status, we can change the status without changing the last update date!

(We have other good reasons why we use our own content status concept: our concept enables centralized management of up to 20 statuses, with  intuitive icon/color/name/description, organized to status schemes that can be applied to any space, etc. We pretty much replicate the Jira status scheme concept in Confluence, which is more advanced than built-in one in Confluence.)

[Brandi Guess]

@Mattias Kallvi  I have an entire automation for this loop. AND I documented it in full. 

You can find the information here: 

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-Cloud-Admins-articles/Keeping-Confluence-Content-Fresh-with-Automation/ba-p/3024065

I would be happy to help you for your specific use case if you want to reach out on LinkedIn as well! 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandiguess/

[Mattias Kallvi]

Thank's for your reply. It was a great post but it doesn't really meet all my needs. I think we need to go with some plugin to achieve our goal.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Let me also note that automations may work well on fairly small sites, but they don't scale to larger ones. For example, rule components may silently skip expired pages if there are more than N (where N is surprisingly small number). 

Or, they also have problems with sending truly personalized notifications, meaning that each recipient will receive the list of the expired pages owned by him.

These are painful in daily practice of larger teams.

[Brandi Guess]

@Aron Gombas _Midori_  I don't agree. I have a fairly large instance, and have not had any issues. the email I send lists all the pages owned by the user receiving the email that meet the criteria, in a nice table that shows the page link, and the space the page exists in. These emails are batched so that each user only receives one email. It took me a long time to get it working how I wanted... it wasn't intuitive, but it is doable. 

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Brandi Guess Ah, OK, congrats!

My opinion is based on feedback we have heard from several users of the Better Content Archiving app, when we asked them how did they find us? Here is the story from one of them, with concrete limitations mentioned.

Typically, they started their journey using Confluence automation rules (which absolutely makes sense), everything looked promising in the beginning, but started to show its shortcomings on the go, and they ended up with using our app. Which is, by the way, purpose-built for this "automated, periodic or specific-date review" use case and is tested with very large data sets.

But, it sounds, like your story ended differently, and that's great!