Changing Confluence content ownership

Question

Hi,

What's the current (easiest) way to transfer content ownership in Confluence 5.2.x and above? Is it still the export content, unzip export, find and replace, re-zip export, import content process mentioned in the comments at https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/66018/how-to-change-the-owner-author-of-a-page-in-confluence?

I know you can change usernames via the UI in Confluence 5.3x and above, but that doesn't fix the content ownership problem as you cannot rename multiple active users to the same disabled user. My plan was to create a disabled user called "retired-user" or similar and change an active user's username to the when they left the company and needed to be removed from Confluence, but as soon as the "retired-user" exists you cannot change the active user's username to it because it already exists (tested on Confluence 5.4.4). There's a note at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Changing+Usernameswhich says "You can however assign the username of a disabled user to another active user.", but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Is changing content ownership still a headache with Confluence 5.3.x and above or am I missing something with the change username functionality?

Cheers,

Andrew.

Andrew Frayling · Answer

Thanks Sabine. Looking Copy Space I don't think that's going to work for us as I wouldn't want all pages in a space to be owned by a single person. It may only be 5%, 10%, 15%, etc. of the pages in a space that need their owner changed, not all of them.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I hadn't seen that solution. And thanks for the other Atlassian Answers reference I'll vote on the the feature request linked from that post.

Sabine Winkler · Answer

Hi,

if "copy space" is an option for you, you might try this approach. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugin.copyspace

Mentioned here: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/90225/can-we-do-a-bulk-change-on-the-pages-to-change-the-owner-of-all-the-pages-in-a-confluence-space(Important here is the last comment: "Note that copying the space will change all tiny links (permalinks) because every page gets a new tiny link in the new space.")

HTH, Sabine

Andrew Frayling · Answer

Shall I take the deafening silence as a "yes, it's still a headache and you have to export, unzip, find/replace, re-zip, import"? :-)