Our company confluence admin left in 2014....need to change and update confluence page

Question

Hi!

I work for HackerRank. We have a confluence page that is extremely unorganized and out-dated. My leadership has tasked me with learning confluence and becoming an admin with permissions. Currently, confluence shows our admin as "former user (2014)." There are no other admins and the old information is not recoverable. There is no one in charge of the site at all. Some people are able to add things to our mess of a space, but very little can be altered/deleted.

I've watched several videos and read many sites about confluence and it appears our site is not up to date. I say this because our layout, format, style and overall appearance looks very different from what I've seen in the videos, screen shots, forums, etc. I would guess we have a much older version. It's like we're using Salesforce Classic while Salesforce Lightning has been out and popular for a while.

I'm not really sure where to start other than trying to get an actual employee of our company assigned as the admin to start clean up and making updates. I was unable to add attachments to this comment, but I'm happy to connect further and however needed to start to make some sense of my predicament.

Short & Sweet Summary:

1. We have no admin.

2. We have no one who can grant or remove permissions.

3. We are unable to make any updates.

4. We cannot change or delete a large portion of the content already created.

5. The previous (2014) admin was not the only user who created content on our confluence page back in the day. Many of the others who created spaces/pages/content are also no longer with the company.

6. The previous admin's email cannot be recovered, nor are we sure of what domain was used in the email, as our company domain email has changed a few times over the years.

I know questions like this have been asked before, but I'm hitting a roadblock with no admin and no permissions, nor anyone to grant them. Any help is very much appreciated!!

Thank you! Happy & Healthy Wishes!

Rachel Lovelace & The HackerRank Team

Rachel Lovelace · Answer

Oh!

I didn't even think about the billing idea - that's a really good place to start!

I haven't used confluence at all since my time here, but most of us are foreign to it. I was essentially asked to jump in and learn as much as I could to make it a viable resource again, so I'm kind of flailing around trying to make sense of it all. The website you linked also looks helpful!

You mentioned the cloud tag - what do you think would be a better tag(s) for this kind of issue?

Thank you!!!

Rachel

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Hmm.  You have tagged this with "Cloud", but I don't think it is possible to get into this situation with Cloud systems

You need a billing and technical contact (can be the same person), and the billing contact is the one paying the subscription regularly, so, presumably, they will be signing something off every year for it.  I can't imagine your organisation not getting that to go through without authorisation of some sort.  So I would go ask the billing person - they can get to user admin, or let other people get to it.

However, it is possible to get into this place with server systems.  Admin leaves, licence expires, but they're perpetual, so everything just carries on working, even without any admin.

In this case, you need to talk to the server admins - they can either

* recover an admin's access (for more recent versions only)
* change the password for an admin account so you can log in with it
* grant an existing account (yours) so that it gains admin rights

See https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/restore-passwords-to-recover-admin-user-rights-158390.html#:~:text=Log%20in%20to%20Confluence%20with,in%20with%20your%20new%20account.

Rachel Lovelace · Answer

Thank you!!! I have read that forum and it does seem closest to helping. The only thing is I don't think we have the corporate owned domain email address of the authorized contact. Our IT team isn't even sure who the previous authorized contact was, and our domain name has changed several times as the company has developed.

BUT I will work with my team and use your advice to the best of our ability!

Thanks again!