Archiving Centrally Spaces that have not been used

[Ellie P.]

Hello! I am a new/inexperienced Confluence Admin and I am now building my knowledge on the product. In my organization we use Confluence Cloud and we are looking to automate the archiving process of unused spaces centrally with the Automation module. I am here to look for best practices at setting up rules for archiving content systematically. 

Specifically

• Archiving Pages or Spaces? Does it make sense to Archive pages that have not been viewed or whole spaces (that are obsolete for example)
• What is the most commonly used time frame after which it is safe to consider a page is probably out of date?
• What other parameters would you consider building in the rules? For example  - if the page has not been viewed at all for 1 year and has not been edited for 2 years? Or if the page has had less than X number of views in the last year?
• How do you identify personal spaces to be archived or deleted?
• Do you notify/involve the Space administrators giving them the chance to un archive?

Any advice is welcome! Thank you in advance for sharing!

Elena

[Levente Szabo _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

@Ellie P. I think that's an excellent advice - automating archiving. I also think that that's just a start, because how do you know what to archive? What's considered not-viewed, not updated, to-review, etc for different teams? If you want a well functioning content lifecycle management system, I suggest read this guide I wrote about how to get started with creating your Confluence content lifecycle management strategy (with a downloadable, real use case strategy you can copy.) I think there are ideas for your question in there as well.

In short, I think you should think through 4 main topics:

1. Automatic page status classification. Make sure you have all the statuses you need, especially if you need more than the 5 available built-in.

2. Automatic email notifications to the right owners or stakeholders, reminding them about expired pages or content that need attention (approval, review, etc.)

3. Automatic archiving/deletion - When no one takes action on reported pages, you should have a scheduled archiving automation that takes care of the right pages at the right time, without bothering you.

4. Confluence usage and reporting - Monitor space and page analytics, identifying most used content, leading contributors and page status changes over time - just to mention a few key metrics.

You can do all that with Better Content Archiving and Analytics - the go-to tool for Confluence content lifecycle management on both Confluence DC and Cloud. We advised the largest Confluence user teams, and would be ready to help with your strategy as well. Reach out to me for a personal consultation at levente.szabo@midori-global.com or through our support channel.

(I'm part of the Midori team, developing Better Content Archiving and Analytics since 2008.)

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ellie P. ,

I would say this all highly depends on the average usage of the product and on internal company policies.

But, from my experience, here are a few tips:

• Space creation should be monitored (you don't want everyone to be able to create a space). That being said, pages are more likely to need to be automatically archived, and as for spaces, you could create some kind of 'reminders' to review the space content if there are no 'active pages' within a specific space.
• Time frame - I'd suggest going with those from rule templates. So something around 12 months. But, again, this highly depends on the content itself and the organization of users within the product.
• Personal spaces - this is debatable. I usually prefer the way of users who actually need the personal space to submit a request for it (so the admin can create them one). Everything else is mostly cluttering the site itself and comes down to be highly inefficient; like, more than 80% of Confluence users usually don't need personal space.
  Moving with this approach, you would archive or delete the space once the user who owned the space would leave the company.

Content organization is usually what most organizations don't pay that much attention to (at least not until it's really necessary), so I don't have that many examples but I'm hoping there will be more case examples in the future 🤞

Cheers,
Tobi

[Ellie P.]

Hi Tobi, thank you for your useful reply and for your time writing it to me! We do monitor space creation including personal spaces. Your suggestion about automating the archiving of pages instead of spaces and review the spaces when it has no active spaces is a good one. We ll just have to give it a start and do it ;-)

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ellie P.

Generally speaking, archiving unused content is always a good idea. :) Automating this task is an even better one.

Confluence automation gives you some possibilities to do this, e.g., by archiving or labeling pages that haven't been updated for some time. However, for a more advanced content lifecycle, you probably want more than this, including crystal-clear review responsibilities, status reports, and dedicated review UIs to make users the task of reviewing and updating their pages as convenient as possible.

If you are searching for a simple-to-use yet powerful document management solution for all of this (including your requested feature of auto-archiving unused pages), you can try Breeze.

While it can be tested for free, you can also schedule a personal demo with me to see how it works and whether it fits your use case.

See you at the demo. ;-)

All the best,
Adrian from B1NARY (we are the developers of Breeze)

[Ellie P.]

Many thanks for your reply Adrian