Feedback Request: Confluence Admin Home

[John Hooper]

Hello Confluence Cloud admins!

I’m John, a Product Manager for the Confluence Admin Experience team, and we're working on a new Admin Home feature.

Our vision for this feature is to create a dedicated workspace for site admins to view insights, tasks, and suggestions to help you govern your Confluence sites more efficiently and more effectively.

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Help shape our feature:

What are the basic capabilities that you feel that this feature must have?

What insights / analytics would be most valuable to you? Which of the insight categories in the following list would be most useful to you? And what's missing from this list?

Insight Category	Example
User activity	active users, active guest users
Content activity	X pages viewed, X whiteboards created
Content management	bulk archive jobs run, X new labels used
Feature activity	automation jobs run, public links created
App activity	X users engaged with Y app
Storage management	% of storage used
Site performance / reliability	time to interaction of page views

And if you're open for a brief chat about the feature, please schedule a time with me to chat through this link: https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Thank you and looking forward to hearing from you! 

[Elizabeth.Johnson]

Hi! 

I love this and I definitely have ideas, but its one of those things that because someone asked I have forgotten them all. I am watching this so I will circle back with other ideas when they come back to me :) 

I love what is listed, and I have definitely been looking for usability, etc metrics so I would LOVE to chat about this feature too. Please reach out :)

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Elizabeth_Johnson ! That's great to hear, and would love to hear any ideas that come back to you :) 

I've now (belatedly) created this link for scheduling a time on my calendar to chat:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Elizabeth.Johnson]

So I love the examples shared above - I think this would be very helpful. 

Also would like to learn more about the ability to create a macro/saving filters on confluence and sharing confluence search results. 

The idea of space owners is something that I think can work really well for our team as well. 

[Tere Pile]

I would like some means to more effectively manage 'permissions' w/out creating 'groups'.  Maybe along the lines of roles (like w/in Jira) where the 'space' admin can manage who's in what role vs. me having to manage groups.  

Then insights into who is in what role per space w/in this admin feature (which would be a great update for Jira also) 

Cleaning up our confluence instance is a needed activity and over due but so time consuming! 

Open to a chat.

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY]

@Tere Pile 

Cleaning up Confluence can be way less time-consuming with Breeze.

This app establishes automated content analyses and review and archiving workflows.

You always know which content is up-to-date, needs a review, or is archivable.

Moreover, with analytics, data export, and enhanced space and page ownership features, Breeze is a complete content lifecycle management solution, which helps tremendously with keeping Confluence clean and organized.

If you like, you can schedule a demo and see it in action.

Cheers, Adrian (one of the developers of Breeze)

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Tere Pile ! Lots of really interesting points you mentioned here. 

I've created this link for scheduling a time on my calendar to chat if you'd like to find a time to dive in further:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

My team is also looking at ways to help with cleaning up a Confluence instance, so would love to hear any ideas you have around that as well, either here or in a chat soon.

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Chris Buzon]

I am very interested in this, especially around app usage.  I find it really difficult to figure out if we're actually using certain installed plugins, and from what I can tell there isn't a great way to do it now -- macro reports are rather limited.

[John Hooper]

Interesting, thanks @Chris Buzon. Do you have specific metrics in mind that you wish existed to help you evaluate your team's usage of a plugin?

And would love to dive in on your thoughts here if you're open for a chat on this:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Maya Gardner]

I am open to a chat. I would love to have better visibility into space analytics - we have so many spaces that I am sure are stagnant or the author has left etc. 

[John Hooper]

Thanks, @Maya Gardner ! We're working on allowing for bulk update of Page Owners, and are also exploring a 'Space Owner' concept, so it sounds like we may be on the right track for your needs

I'd love to hear more about what you're running into and how we might improve things if you're open for a chat on this:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Wayne_Reilly]

Hi John,

What I'd like:

User activity - another thing to add would be to display the spaces/pages a user has content when you deactivate them. Currently you just get told there are active spaces/pages but no idea what they are. Also what spaces a group has access to would be handy. We have a ton of groups and I feel many can be removed but some are named poorly so we have no idea if they can be removed or not.

App activity would be great.

Site performance / reliability would be a good one too. We have users complain about poor performance but all we can suggest is trying a different browser, clearing cache etc and hope for the best.

Wayne

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Wayne_Reilly !

Am I correct in assuming the piece on "...spaces/pages a user has content when you deactivate them"  is that they have access to?

And makes sense on the group + app management and performance / reliability elements. 

I'd love to hear on your thoughts on all of these if you're open for a chat:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Debbie Jolley]

Like the sound of this - anything that helps us maintain our Confluence instances is a great thing, and am happy to have a chat on the subject.

The listed items all sound good - the specific things I can think of at the moment that would be useful are:

• easy way to locate any orphaned pages (ones whose owners are no longer licensed users) - to either change ownership or archive/delete as applicable
• some way to find pages, either within a specific space or across the whole instance, that haven't been viewed/accessed over a certain period

[John Hooper]

Nice, thank you @Debbie Jolley !

Both items make a lot of sense. I'd love to learn more about what you've been running into along these lines you're interested in a chat:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Debbie Jolley you can find the page not viewed for N days using the Better Content Archiving app. It has its own analytics engine that can auto assign the "Not viewed" status to a page using a custom condition.

Then you can get a Content Status Overview report per space and even per site with number of pages in the "Not viewed" status:

If you click a number, you will get the list of the pages in the corresponding status:

(To be precise, it is a list of contents, because all the features are available for all content types - including blog posts, too.)

[Steve Rhodes]

Storage management, being able to see which space and pages is taking up the space. 

Also for user activity, as an admin the confluence activity includes pages where the Jira Macros were repaired so often admins have 1000s of pages in their activity. 

We have a blend of externals and internals in our Confluence and right now we can't see which spaces the externals have been given access to. I understand this is probably now something you can easily show in insights but its sorely needed. A similar function exists in Jira.

I'm always open to discussions with Atlassian. We are running Confluence Standard so the automation and bulk archive is not relevant. (Please make basic automation available like in Jira!)

[John Hooper]

Thanks, @Steven Rhodes ! 

On the "...where the Jira Macros were repaired so often admins have 1000s of pages in their activity" item, is that mainly an issue relating to the number of notifications? And with the spamming, rendering the activity bell useless? 

I'd love to hear more on your items if you're open for a chat:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY]

Hi @John Hooper

Many thanks for sharing these insights with us. There are already dedicated apps in the Marketplace for some of these (and the ideas within the comments). So I'm curious how you consider the vendor side when developing this new admin dashboard.

Open to chat.

[John Hooper]

Thank you, @Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY , it's a great call out. 

I'd love to discuss this together to hear more about what you think would be an appropriate way for us to navigate these types of projects:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Cassie the Jira Mechanic]

I am open to chat about the feature.

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Cassie the Jira Mechanic ! 

Please schedule a time with me here:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Steven Haworth]

Great topic.  I'd like better ways to manage users:

• Easily bulk edit everyone - re-enable, disable, change product access, change group membership
• Bulk edit / sort based on:
  • Email domain (in our world, there's different parts of the company, and using domain is the quickest way to analyze that, but I have to do w/ exporting to Excel first).
  • Time since last interaction
  • Group membership
  • Access level
  • Product access
• For license mgmt, auto-disable access after some time period - like no logins within the last X months, for example
• Easily bulk edit permissions across Jira projects or Confluence spaces - for example adding a group and giving (or denying) access to that group across multiple Jira / Confluence items at once.
• Simple way to check # of attachments, storage space used - Jira & Confluence
• App usage - yes!  I'd love to see which apps are used, sorted by the user groups above (email domain, group, etc)

[John Hooper]

Nice, super helpful feedback, @Steven Haworth ! All items make sense, and will relay these to some of my internal partners as well

I'd love to learn more all of your needs here if you're interested in a chat:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Liz Burns]

Hi, John, thanks for the invite!

Definitely content management and feature activity for me: we have recently migrated to the Confluence Cloud and we’re finding so many problems that anything admins can solve/UAT/report with realistic expectations would be great. 

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Liz Burns ! Makes sense, especially with your situation as a recent migrator.

I'd love to hear more about that migration transition and some of the pains you're feeling now if you're interested in a chat:
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

Hope to speak with you soon!

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Liz Burnswe build apps with a focus on bulk content management. I would like to learn about what problems you need to solve. stavros@easyapps.app.

Here is our app with a suite of features called Space Content Manager.

[Dan Tombs]

All booked in. Look forward to the chat :)

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Awesome, @John Hooper  I've scheduled a slot.

[Liat Algranti Fern]

Hi,

I think it would be a great thing to look at the opposite, like, what pages are not in use for X time to help clean up irrelevant data in the system and prevent confusion. what data/activities we're not looking at that we should.

Cheers.

[John Hooper]

Nice, thank you @Liat Algranti Fern ! Makes a lot of sense. 

Please feel free to schedule a chat with me if you'd like to discuss in more detail!
https://calendar.app.google/UVP3GMbrsL8m4PYP6

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Liat Algranti Fern You can already track "what pages are not in use for X time" with the Better Content Archiving app! It gives many tools to learn what pages/blogposts are in what state on your site.

You can check for views, updates and any combination of those. You can get reports. You can even run  structured searches like "in space FOO and BAR what are the pages not viewed for 356 days and not updated for 200 days and not labeled with important"?

And you can do this continuously in the background, combined with notifications, automations (auto-archive, auto-delete), etc.

[Joseph Nicholls]

In Confluence as an Admin, I should be a true admin like I was when we were On Prem. I should not have to pay double for Premium to gain access to Admin Key. Can you please tell me why this is? There should be no Space that I as an Admin should be locked out of or not have permissions to in our instance. We have an employee that has left the institution that replaced Restrictions on all of the pages that he created. I am not able to access them without Admin Key it seems. Is there some work around that I do not know about??? 

[Liz Burns]

This is one of our major problems as well. We need some kind of middle tier that allows admins to perform at the very least the same functions we did with the Server instance. I've also never seen a justification for it from Atlassian. 

[Steve Rhodes]

I'm totally with you on this one. Holding admin features to ransom is disgraceful but Confluence Premium just isnt as good value as Jira Premium so they instead opted to take features away from Standard that make your life easier instead. 

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Joseph Nicholls. It's a fair point, especially given the difference vs the on prem experience. 

Our current POV on what goes into what edition is centered around categorizing various admin features into 'core admin tools' vs 'advanced admin tools'. Admin Key is a feature that we've categorized as an advanced tool, hence its inclusion in Premium only currently. 

But point taken though that you, @Liz Burns, @Steven Rhodes see Admin Key and other admin features as core features rather than advanced features given the examples shared. Taking note of this, and will share this with my team internally.

To set proper expectations, I'm not promising that there will be any immediate changes here, but I do think there are healthy discussions to be had on my team about what features are available on which plan.

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

Permissions overview - who has access to what in general terms. The ability to add guests is great but it is yet again another layer of complexity.

Many Confluence admins in smaller to mid sized companies are not Confluence pros, have been assigned the role or someone leaves and they become the admin.

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps . Do you have any additional info you could share on your suggestion? Namely:

- Would this mainly be for a product admin looking at which spaces a user / group has access to you?

- Would this be for both product and space admins looking at which content items a user / group has access to you?

- Do you need to see what level of access a user has? Or just a binary does the user have access or not?

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@John Hooperan easy overview of who has access to what. Then if see something that needs to change can invest time. Right now first layer is too complicated, start easier and click to do more complex.

[John Hooper]

Got it, thank you @Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps !

[Alina]

Hi,

I want to share some requirements and suggests about confluence. 

Due to the work requirement and enterprises' net-frame, I want to find a way to Synchronous one space in Confluence site-A to the Confluence site-B. And site-A is physical isolate with site-B. It's look like a very difficult mission because our site-B is not allowed working with any other network and also cloud, it's like a Isolated-Island.

Meanwhile, I have tried "Restore & backup" , but it maybe affects Confluence running so my colleague refuse cooperate with this work and turn down this way. 

So, if there is a great import way, I am glad to export one page from site-A then import it to site-B, one by one. However, confluence only allow import word document. I mean, can you develops somethings like confluence document format, export file including all macros and content that page have, then I can import this confluence document directly without any modify. That's will help me a lot in my work!!

Looking forward to your reply! Thanks!

[Alina]

And also, I want to know if there is a plugin could count how many pages a person has created in a certain period of time or how many pages a person has modified/deleted. That will also help our team a lot!! Thanks!!

[Alina]

@John Hooper