Manage your stale pages... in bulk!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

I’m John, a Product Manager focused on improving the experience of admins within Confluence Cloud. I’m excited to share that you can now filter to a space’s inactive content and view new insights about each content item in our Manage content tree feature!

This work is part of our efforts to provide more capabilities to help you manage your content efficiently. What's being released includes:

• The new Inactive pages filter
• New metadata about each content item:
  • Page owner
  • Time since content item was last viewed
  • Number of views in the last year

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How it works

A space admin first navigates to the Manage content tree feature within the Manage content section of our Space Settings:

Once in the Manage content tree feature, admins will immediately see the following new metadata columns we’ve added to provide context about the content they’re reviewing:

Admins can then click on the Inactive pages lozenge to see all of their pages that have not had any views, comments, or updates in the last 180 days (and they can the also change the time frame being used for the definition of ‘stale’), and can then archive or delete the desired pages in bulk:

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FAQs

Which editions of Confluence Cloud is this available to?

Customers on our Premium and Enterprise editions only

How are you defining a content item as 'inactive'?

Items that have not received any views, comments, or updates in the chosen timeframe (last 180 days is the default)

When can I start using these updates?

Now! These enhancements have been fully rolled out

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As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback! 

[Andy Gladstone]

Wow. This will make managing the update and recycle processes we have much easier. I logged in to a space I thought was suffering from some lack of love and found exactly which content needed revision. I'd love to be able to sort the columns by last viewed and last updated, but do understand that since this is working with the content tree it may not be so simple to sort by column when trying to preserve the integrity of the tree.

[John Hooper]

Thank you @Andy Gladstone ! Glad to hear it!

And appreciate the feedback on being able to sort the columns. We'll look more into this in our upcoming work on the feature

[Dave Mathijs]

Great to see improvements and new features in this "gardening" area @John Hooper !

[Pres]

This is great !

[Filip Callewaert]

Nice! I really hope this evolves to a real space mission control center, with much more metadata of pages listed that in bulk can be manipulated, eg. permissions overview, or: filter for all pages owned by x > bulk change ownership to y, or: overview and filter for specific status > mail page owner etc.

Moreover, having the human view on this set of data, and the ability to manually filter and manipulate has its value next to Automations, I think. (cfr the Boeing vs Airbus view on Automation).

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Filip Callewaert I think your requirements, at least the last few ones about overview pages with their status and taking actions like emailing owners are more content lifecycle management tasks. I think the Confluence Mission Control does not want to go there.

If you are interested in understanding the Confluence content status across your instance, I recommend taking a look at the Content Status Overview provided by Better Content Archiving for Confluence:

If you are looking to email owners, you can build an automation and define under what circumstances should Confluence page owners be emailed. It's also important not to overwhelm owners with emails and send page lists instead of one email page:

The goal is to make sure the Mission Control features and automatic Confluence lifecycle management capabilities are both at the disposal of Confluence admins to effectively manage their instances.

(Please note that Better Content Archiving is a free/paid, supported app and I'm part of the team developing it.)

[Filip Callewaert]

Thank you, @Levente Szabo _Midori_  for your thourough explanation! Please be not confused in my use of the term 'mission control center' - I do not talk about the Confluence Admin Mission Control here, but about the content management offering for Space Admins that could become my Space Mission Control Center - it is where it should be: at space admin level.

As I wrote, indeed, some actions can be done automatically, but one always wants to have a managerial view on the space content - a dashboard or whatever. So thank you, Atlassian, for this 'Manage Content' overview. And it's not the Analytics or the Insights - it's the start for a real dashboard for the information manager. 
Today I'm mimicking my information management with Confluence Databases, combined with Automations, which combination I like very much. Though that managerial overview should be presented at space level - in the admin corner - exactly at the place I'm looking at right now (see above). 

Moreover, archiving pages is for me a standard action in the lifecycle of content. So is securing ownership, and performing quality checks, guarding the proper use of statuses etc. I do hope to find it there one day. I cannot imagine that this will be it: a 'Manage Content'-corner in which we only will be able to bulk delete and archive... What a poor story to sell Premium. Remember that we waited since the beginning of Cloud for the 'bulk delete pages' capability ... -- something I do not get explained to any user. (Oh, there is an app for that!). Getting the means to filter on page owner, select these pages, and change the owner: is one of my Premium expectations (without having to write an Automation rule for every page owner that changes positions in the company). 

So I keep hoping that the 'Manage content' area will grow and offer more (simple (Standard) or complex (Premium)) information management capabilities.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

Oh, alright, yes, that makes sense. Again, I do think your requirements are very valid and would make a great value add to Confluence Cloud. However, as you say, content lifecycle management requirements can be very complex and vary by company, team, and department. It requires a flexible and customizable system. Atlassian is investing in general, simple fixes and can't be expected to build specialized solutions.

I think 2 things from your comment are particularly important: 

1. Various content management options on the space level
2. Important content management and automation offers are Premium-only

I think the Marketplace ecosystem will have a role to play in solving these. Especially the second one: many teams in the Standard edition would need features like automation, analytics, reporting, etc and they can only get those by using apps catering to these requirements.

To this end, a site and space-level, comprehensive analytics dashboard - or managerial overview, as you said - will soon come to Better Content Archiving. (See a sneak peek below)

1. It is a Premium and Enterprise-level quality analytics feature for all tiers
2. It is advanced analytics and overview that works also on the space level.

Keep an eye on this space and let me know if you (or anyone else) want to be among the first to be notified when it comes out!