Did you allow all users to create site spaces? How did it go?

Steven Drury

Hello all, 

We're about to move from Confluence Server to Cloud. In our on-prem, users did not have permissions to create their own spaces. I'm wondering as we configure the cloud instance what the repercussions are of allowing all users to create all spaces. 

If you have done this, what was your experience? Do many people create spaces? Do they clean them up afterwards (I think I know this answer)? Do you have a cleanup/grooming policy?

Cheers,
Steve

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Very good subject.

In answer to the title of the discussion, my easy answer is "no".  Not because I could have done it and chose not to, but because my second experience with Confluence was with one where the previous admin had, and I got paid quite well for writing code to help clean up the mess, even in quite a small Confluence.  To simplify - never grant "create global space" to more than a handful of people.

Moving on to the details, I've looked after many Confluences with both "can create personal space" and "cannot".  It's probably easier to separate out the answers:

If people can NOT create a personal space

• They don't have a play area, which leads to a mix of "junk pages in real spaces" and "frustrated people who can't work out how to do stuff".  A test system can really help for a lot of people, but it won't catch all of them.
• A tendency to go off and draft things in <insert their favourite tool> then complain about copying or importing because it's not as good as doing it directly in Confluence  (Although, I admit, today, I almost yelled at TWO of my peers for posting a link to a google doc today.  We're an Atlassian consultancy with a perfectly good Confluence 6 available, WTF are you doing using google to do collaborative editing when we're supposed to be "dogfooding" Atlassian?)

If people CAN create a personal space

• Very much stronger uptake of Confluence, because people can try things out
• Vast amounts of utter junk in personal spaces, that, unfortunately, Atlassian's default search weights tend to quite like.
• I think your "I think I know" is spot on, and matches mine.  No, we humans don't clean up our personal spaces.  Mine has a banner across it saying "my profile is the only page here you should read", but that's really weak.
• Yes, you should absolutely build a cleanup policy. 
• The only place I have seen "allow personal spaces" work well forced the points we are concerned about.  I wrote some code that we ran weekly.  It looked at every top-level page in personal spaces (apart from the profile/home), mailed the admins the page title and wrote it to a new "this week I cleaned this" page, and then restricted the personal page to just the owner.  Clumsy, yes, but it forced people to think about moving their pages to the right spaces, and gave us lists of pages we could safely delete because no-one had ever asked about them again. 
• I know I probably should not say this, but a policy is something everyone should have, and Adaptavist are just as bad as everyone else.  We're always finding damn useful stuff in people's personal spaces that really needs to be moved and shared.
• Don't be scared to challenge people's personal space usage.  I am good at writing up stuff I do for clients in my personal space, when it's highly technical.  I am very bad at moving or sharing it because I will write something that works, but not like the criticism I might get from people who are better than me at what I've just done.