On the sidebar choose Spaces > any project > Knowledge base. Click on any article. Now on the right sidebar it will show "Space:".. but it's not the same meaning of Space as on the left sidebar.
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@Josh Sherwood thank you for the description of what's changing including the rollout timeline; it's very helpful.
Overall, I'm in support of moving away from Jira "projects". I was still hoping that there'd be some consideration to using a slightly different phrase (e.g. "workspace" - a space for your work) instead of using the same terminology in use with Confluence for a decade plus.
It feels a bit like we're trading one type of user confusion for another here. Any efforts to disambiguate "spaces" between Jira and Confluence would be greatly appreciated!
I am still failing to understand why there is confusion around the word "Project". Jira's whole intent is for project management, specifically for agile development, and it is fully understood that each "Project" in Jira is a project being worked on, with a start and end. Collaboration is still possible among other teams without having to rename it to "Space".
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@Chris Calvert I imagine internally we're going to end up with (singular focus) Project Spaces and (cross-functional) Team Spaces. That seems to be our only sensible approach to the terminology.
Thanks @Josh Sherwood for fixing the wording issues (not in the sense of work item ;-)) for german language.
Overall, I am not in favour of these terminology changes. In technical environments, I believe it is good practice to use established expressions consistently throughout documentation and lifecycles to minimise doubt and questions within the end user community.
'A car is a car is a car' may sound boring, but it is consistent.
If you use different terms such as 'car', 'vehicle', 'auto', 'automobile', 'motorcar' or 'wheels', it will raise questions as to whether you mean the same thing.
and we wanted to introduce more user-friendly terminology for teams as quickly as possible.
I sincerely hope this was meant as a joke (but I know it wasn't).
So Atlassian made a bad decision to go with the rename of projects to spaces. Then they implemented that change poorly. Projects are randomly renamed in some places and randomly they are still "projects".
Go to a Permission Scheme. The permission is Administer Projects. You can grant that permission to Project Lead, for example. Or, you can grant it to a member of a Space Role.
Try to create a Data Security Policy and good luck understanding what Coverage type "Spaces and projects" means now. Hey Atlassian, you forgot to rename projects to spaces here. And when you do rename it, what will it be? "Spaces and spaces"?
Try to read documentation, kb articles. How many of them are still using terms "issue" and "projects"? Tons of them.
these are just some examples I came across, and I didn't do it on purpose, I am sure there are tons more
It is a mess. A poorly done job. You may argue that the renaming of projects to spaces is actually a good decision (and you would be wrong). But you can't argue that you failed to actually do the renaming. Why do customers have to deal with this? Customers pay to get quality. This is not it. You can't rename it in 20 places this month, in 10 places next month, and in 150 places next year. Actually, we can see that you can, but you shouldn't. Would you do it properly please?
And when asked in a comment above "how so?", Atlassian's excuse is "we wanted to introduce more user-friendly terminology for teams as quickly as possible.". What? It was like that for 15-20 years, then came 2025 in which many users no one asked to rename projects to spaces, and now you are suddenly in such a hurry to make it as soon as possible that you do a messy rename job.
Bad job every step of the way: decision making, implementation, communication.
Why? Why don't you respect customers who pay money for your products? Why don't you respect your 'ecosystem' - people who try to sell your products, administer them and try to teach others to do it? Why don't you respect yourself and allow releasing/deploying such a bad job to a very wide audience?
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