Hello team, I would like to transfer the ownership of a page I created to a new person. I didn't find the option in the UI. Is it possible to do it?
Welcome to the Atlassian Community!
Confluence doesn't have a concept of "page ownership" beyond "the owner of the page is all the administrators of this space".
If you're looking at Author, the person who wrote the page, then that's not right. You can't change the Author, and you don't want to - it would destroy the information about who created the page.
Well not sure what you mean by ownership of a page. The person listed as having created the page? What are you trying to achieve?
Those values don't really mean anything for the operation of Confluence, so no need to "transfer ownership". Any one with permissions can access and edit the page.
You could theoretically update that value through the API, but there is no real reason for doing it.
While I agree with you, this is a real weakness for organisations using Confluence as a knowledge base, because the lifespan of a page can be vastly longer than the involvement of the original author. This can lead to the situation where admins simply don't know who has responsibility for a page.
I appreciate this is less a problem for pages which are genuine collaborations among multiple staff - and I appreciate too that the principle use case for Confluence is collaboration rather than content management. But the reality is that some of us who have been using it for a long time _are_ using it for content management. And this is a constant source of frustration.
Just to be clear I agree your answer. But I've seen this question get asked multiple times in the years I've been using this forum. It's something I didn't realise when I signed up 8+ years ago, and if I had realised, I would probably have continued looking for a more suitable product.
Thanks for the helpful reply - it's important that this limitation of Confluence is as visible as possible.
Well when confronted with this issue 10+ years ago, I started adding metadata to pages (and then displaying that data with a user macro) to show who the page owner was from the stand point of content. I was creating most of the content structure, so was shown as the original author. This method also allowed me to re-assign page ownership as needed.
Then I could use this metadata for reporting, or for our publishing process built using Comalatech Workflows (plugin name has evolved since then).
Confluence also records the last user who edited a page. This is kind of "the last author who contributed".
However this information is not directly visible for a user. We have developed and app which allows you to show this last editor in your page or in a page properties macro: Document Metadata.
Hallo Bill,
that sounds interesting, I'd like to learn how you did this. I can have a header table with an owner, but this is still hard to report or to have an overview on all pages. any macro's that help for this?
The repeated short sightedness in these forums frequently floors me.
Confluence doesn't have a concept of "page ownership" beyond "the owner of the page is all the administrators of this space". [...] You can't change the Author, and you don't want to - it would destroy the information about who created the page.
This is stated as though there could never be a need to change ownership. The number of reasons a person may want to change the ownership are not up to you. In our case, we recently migrated from server to cloud. We were using AD for auth in server, and we are using Azure AD and Access in the cloud. The system migrated all the data over with user information. But when the users migrated over, about 1/3 of our users got migrated from sAMAccountName with 'outside' email addresses to UPN. Now that they have to log in with their domain account (and domain email address), they are no longer seen as the authors (or owners) of their old data by confluence. How do I take ~100 users who all have several hundred pages that they own (tens of thousands of pages), and make them the author of their pages again? Many of these pages are private pages accumulated over years of work, and not collaborated "team" space pages."You can't do that, because we never accounted for deviance from our box" is a HORRIBLE answer. And "There's a marketplace app" IS EVEN WORSE... so don't. Just... don't. We pay 6 figures a year for this product and "Go buy an ANOTHER add-on" is getting old, unaffordable and un-sustainable!
>This is stated as though there could never be a need to change ownership. The number of reasons a person may want to change the ownership are not up to you.
I am sorry, but you have completely missed the point. There's no problem with changing ownership.
The problem is that you are assuming that author = owner, and that's horribly wrong.
What you are suggesting here is that because the Disney group owns the Marvel stuff, they should be credited as the only author? Expunging Stan Lee from all the history of actually writing a lot of it?
And if you work in a regulated industry, it's usually illegal to change the author of something. The person who did it needs to remain accountable.
You can't tell me that's the right thing to do. The Author and the Owner are different things.
It seems my responses which legitimize my position keep getting (childishly) deleted, but it doesn't mean I'm going away. I'll keep speaking out against unprofessional behavior as required.
There's definitely a need for this, despite Nic's irrelevant ramblings. For example, we're trying to migrate content from another wiki over to confluence using the REST API. However it is my understanding that the creator/owner/author of these pages is going to be whoever ran the request via the API. We don't want that, as that person is NOT the original owner of the documentation. We would want to retain the ownership from the original authors, or at least be able to modify the "created by" field so it shows the right person.
"You could theoretically update that value through the API, but there is no real reason for doing it."We have a use case that could benefit from this, but I have not seen the documentation on it, would you be able to point me in the right direction? I was searching the REST API documentation but couldn't find the page owner properties.
Was this functionality briefly available yesterday?
Yes! It seems we got some traction on this. Thank you Atlassian team, @marc -Collabello--Phase Locked- and @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- !
This functionality does not seem to have appeared in the Confluence Cloud REST API yet. Is there a timeline for when Atlassian will support the change ownership feature in the REST API?
The accepted answer is way off. Sure, there's a concept of the logged in user who created the page (object) in the first place and that has some legitimacy as an auditable facet of the page.. but add in Comala Workflows and you have a real problem.
The user creates the page, starts a workflow and then leaves the company - this is a huge problem with control of the workflow from then on, as it derives from the original page creator.
Sure, you could say it's a fault with Comala, but it's just inheriting the ownership model from Confluence.
Possibly extending the page ownership paradigm to creator/maintainer would cover all bases.
The OP probably just needs to update the write permissions to the original page, but its a vague enough question to stoke this lovely skip fire in the replies
I think you need to re-read the thread properly.
With the recent introduction of the page owner feature in Confluence Cloud, it's important to be aware of its limitations:
For those seeking to elevate their page ownership experience, Better Content Archiving offers a more advanced Confluence page owner concept that not only overcomes these limitations but also includes a user-friendly macro for displaying pages owned by you or others, complete with page status details:
Learn about a better way to Confluence page owners >>
(Please note that Better Content Archiving is a free/paid, supported app and I'm part of the team developing it.)
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