Managing a project team in Confluence

Question

It seems logical for a project leader to create a space in Confluence in which the project's work will be performed and organized. A project has a team of people working on it. Confluence's access model makes it easy to limit access to the space to the members of the team. All good so far.

What I don't get is that there's no way for the project leader to add the team members as watchers of the new project space or just its blog. The leader can direct them to a page or to a blog post but they are limited to requesting that they watch the space of the blog. Even then, the project leader doesn't have any way to see if the team members complied with the request.

This is my company's #1 complaint about Confluence. The omission of these simple features just seems to defy explanation. Our #2 complaint is the organization of its menus. It is worse than the Microsoft Office ribbon UI. I find that I search in several menus before finding the command I need to use. Not only that, some menus scroll with the page content while others stay at the top without any logical scheme that I've been able to detect.

Lee Anne Peders · Answer

Paul,

Have you tried the Team Space blueprint? I was just reviewing the release notes for v5.3 and thought they might be a solution for adding team members as watchers.

The Team Space blueprint ships with a customised homepage that highlights the members of the team, and makes blogs prominent on the homepage. You will be prompted to enter the members of your team when creating a Team Space. Your team members will be granted permissions, included on the space homepage and added as watchers of the space automatically.

I'm still on v5.1.4, so I don't know how well it works.

Paul Topping · Answer

That's not the same thing at all.

William Zanchet · Answer

Hi Paul,

I was doing some research on the topic that you've raised, and I could find the following improvement request that has the same subject:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-20118

I would strongly suggest that you vote on this issue to increase its popularity and add it to your watchlist for future updates.
Also, I was thinking in a workaround that might be feasible for you. You could create a dummy user that has a mail list, that way once the email is trigged you everyone in that mail list would receive an email.

I hope this helps.
Cheers,
WZ