Pros and cons of using `confluence-administrators` as a default group on Confluence Spaces

Svetlin

Dear Community Members,

Given the `confluence-administrators` group is member of many spaces at the instance I manage, do you think there could be some arguments against using this group as a default group on all Confluence spaces? 

At your companies, do you use `confluence-administrators` as default one?

Do you use Confluence spaces as personal spaces to document something (secrets or highly confidential data)?

The thing is, if that group isn't there, we have to go and ask each team member to add us to the space or use the global permissions. An admin told me we don't want to see all spaces. Could this be a valid reason? 

Which would you say is best practice in this case? 

Here are also some pros (I confess they come from our custom GPT from ChatGPT), but still seem like valid reasons, I am curious to learn what you think about these: 

• Adding confluence-administrators as a "backdoor" can help resolve locked-out situations, such as when no other users or groups have admin rights in the space.
• Administrators can review and audit space configurations, ensuring consistency with organizational policies.
• Mitigates risks of knowledge gaps or delays if space owners leave the organization or are unavailable.
• Enables admins to review and manage spaces that might be hidden or archived, ensuring they are properly maintained or decommissioned.
  
  

BR

Tomislav Tobijas

Hi @Svetlin ,

I would say this highly depends on the internal policies your company is using.

While in some cases we use confluence-administrators as a default group, in environments where we have IdP connected to the Atlassian Org, a specific 'administrators' group is set as the default instead of a system-created one. This is because everything is and should be managed through an identity provider instead of the Atlassian user directory.

As for the part about whether this administrators group should be added to all spaces, I would say it's more about preference and governance. If you want to 'hide' irrelevant spaces, you would probably want to have this case you've described - where an administrators group is not added to a space.
Another perspective is that the admin group manages these spaces and ensures each space complies with set policies. You would probably prefer that an admin group be added to each space so members can easily see what spaces are active and check each of them. In cases where these spaces are only accessible via Confluence administration, they often get 'buried' and space configurations might be off if the space admin is not experienced in managing Confluence content.

From my experience, governance of Confluence content is often on a 'lower level' than managing Jira projects and data within.

Cheers,
Tom