New! Assign and transfer page ownership!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

My name is Tiffany Chung, and I’m a Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team. We’ve been working on an exciting new feature that helps users maintain page validity and communication.

When a page is created in Confluence, the person who originally created it becomes forever associated with that page. Even if they leave the company or the team, there’s been no way for someone else to take over that page. Pages in Confluence often become a source of truth that is referenced for years and years to come, but can be left with a deactivated creator or no easy way to assign a new point-person. This can create a bad experience for readers who may have follow up questions for whomever the current subject matter expert might be.

Until now, there has not been a way for page creators (or admins) to allow someone else to take over a page, in the event of leaving a company or team, or no longer being the point person for a given page. We know this is something our customers have been requesting for a while, and we’ve taken your feedback on board!

That’s why I’m excited to announce page ownership, a new feature rolling out to Confluence.

What’s a page owner

A page owner is the point of contact for page; the person whom others can reach out to for more information about that page’s content. Page owners can be responsible for the content that lives on a page, ensuring that the content on a page stays reliable and up-to-date.

Page owners can be updated at any time by the current page owner, space admin or site admin so that the most appropriate person to manage the page’s content is visible. The original page owner is the page creator and there can only be one page owner for a given page at a time. You can change the ownership of your page, and view the creator and owner history for any page, via a contextual menu within the page byline.

How do you transfer ownership?

As a current page owner, space admin or site admin, you can transfer ownership to another person easily via the ... menu in the page’s byline. You can also review ownership and creator history for any page via this menu.

 1. To get started, select Change owner when the modal appears.

You can also transfer page ownership by selecting Change page owner from the ... menu in the top-right toolbar.

2. Use the search field to browse for a new owner by name or email. Recent page collaborators will auto-populate first. Once you’ve selected the correct person, select Change owner.

In order to transfer page ownership to someone, they need to have edit access to the page in question, as well as access to the space it resides within.

3. Review the selection you’ve made and select Continue if you’re ready to complete the transfer, or Cancel if you’re not. Once you’ve transferred ownership of your page, this change can’t be reversed.

4. Success! Now that you’ve transferred ownership of the page, you’ll retain edit access to it and remain a page “watcher.” However, if you were previously the owner, you’ll no longer be able to make further transfers of ownership for this page unless you are a space admin or site admin of which the page resides.

Remember: Site and space admins are able to transfer ownership of your page to another user.

Note:

• This feature does have a few restrictions. For instance, you cannot transfer ownership from the Confluence mobile app. Moreover, similar to creators today, page owners can lose their edit/view access of a page.

• After transferring ownership to a new person, the previous owner will remain editors of a page until their access is changed.

• Previous owners will still be watchers of the page. Individuals can change their watching status by clicking the :watchlist: icon at the top right of a page.

Notifications

Users will receive an in-app and email notification if they have become a page owner, or if a space or site admin transferred a page you own to someone else.

Currently, these notifications cannot be turned off.

Feedback

We’re really excited about the potential of this feature to help teams maintain trust and credibility with their content - and this is just the start! Our teams are hard at work to bring you even more experiences with page owners.

We’d love for you to try out page owners with your team, and let us know what you think or how you use them in the comments below.

If you don't see the experience today, you'll see it coming to you instance very soon.

[marc -Collabello--Phase Locked-]

Interesting feature.  Is the page owner the same thing as the page author in the page metadata?

[Jawann]

Yessssssss. Thank you!

My only feedback is that it would be awesome if the option to change owner was available in a space's Pages screen (https://SITE.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KEY/pages) so you could update multiple pages more efficiently. Currently you need to click into each page, which adds a lot of clicks when changing the owner for a bunch of pages.

[Lachlan Barclay]

Great! Any news on when it will be added to the REST API?

[Heather Blue]

Hi Tiffany! Thanks for the update on this new feature.

• Are there any admin analytics associated with this feature, and if so, what do those entail?
• Is it possible to bulk transfer page ownership, for instance, when an employee leaves the company?

[Maurice Pasman]

This is a pretty useful feature for customers of Instant 27001, but they would need a bulk update function as well!

[David Meredith]

As much as I'd like to focus on asking why it took 17 years to implement a basic page management feature... I'm just glad it's finally here. Many thanks to the team for making it happen.

Are there plans to build out page owner management functionality? For example if I have someone who left my team in 2006 that was the owner for 300 pages. Transferring the responsibility for keeping these up to date to someone else would mean doing this 300 times...

Will there be a concept of review dates? Like, hey this page on recommended password complexity relates to 2006, the owner needs to archive it or update it. There's already a concept of tasks in Confluence.

Will there be a concept of multiple owners? For example 3 SMEs working to keep documentation up to date?

[Pete Mize]

By "This change cannot be reversed", does that mean that the original person can never be assigned as "Page Owner" again?  Or you cannot change the page owner again?  Either way, this seems to be short-sighted.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

@marc -Collabello--Phase Locked-

Based on "You can also review ownership and creator history for any page via this menu." I'm guessing that creator will remain the same and owner is just a new role in the page history.

[Sonya Petkunas]

Has this feature been released? We are on Premium and do not see this feature yet. Never mind.. logged off and back on and see it now. 

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

@Pete Mize

I'm wondering if this is just in the case of when a page owner who's not an admin transfers ownership. Because once they're not an owner, they have no permissions to do change the owner.
I'd guess site and space admins won't experience this.

[Pete Mize]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_

Possibly, but deeper clarification on this would be appropriate.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

@Pete Mize

We JUST got it in my instance and that seems to be the case. @Cindy Jimaybe you'll want to clarify this in the article. 😉

[Hannah Sanderson]

Once you've transferred ownership of your own page, you are no longer its owner and thus can't then "re-transfer" it again if you've made a mistake.

You would, however:

- be able to reach out to your admin to rectify the incorrect transfer

- be able to become the page owner again if ownership was transferred back to you by another user or admin

Feel free to check out our support docs for more info here: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/transfer-ownership-of-your-page-to-another-person/

Thank you so much for the feedback! We are hoping to continue developing and improving this feature - and yes, bulk transfer is at the top of our list!

[Pete Mize]

@hannah

Thank You, this clarifies.  Now I understand that it is from the perspective if the current owner, and not from an admin point of view.

[Tiffany Chung]

Hey folks, thanks for all the feedback here, truly appreciate it.

To address some of your comments:

• We have plans to implement a bulk page transfer functionality, a team is working on it!
• We heard mixed user feedback in our research about single vs. multiple page owners and have recorded this feature request, but currently have no plans to implement at the moment. 

[Heather Blue]

Hi @Tiffany Chung thanks for the response. Another follow up:

• Roughly when do you expect to roll out bulk page transfer functionality?
• Regarding the page ownership transfer: if someone leaves the company and they did not transfer their pages to someone else before they left, are admins the only ones who can then change page owners on those pages?
  • I'd recommend opening page ownership up in the event it belongs to a deactivated user so individual teams can handle page ownership transfer themselves, otherwise it is an admin heavy reliance
  • Or, add another degree of space permissions: users who can change page owners. I'd give all managers at my company this permission for instance.

Thanks!

[thomas_ohrbom]

Is this new role of "Page owner" a page property that we can reference through for instance add-ons like Scroll Word Exporter etc?

[Thomas Riener]

Many thanks for this feature! Is there a way to get an overview about all sites owned by a person?

[Hana Kučerová]

Interesting feature, I like it. Thank you.

[Randy O_Neal]

Finally!!  Thank you SO MUCH!!  It's so nice to be able to reassign ownership of pages to people still working at our company rather than Owned by Former User (deleted).  This is awesome...

[Dan Tombs]

This is such a great little addition to a Confluence page. I'm really happy to see page ownership transfer included. It would be great to see this within the API so we can bulk do this, but also possibly as an action within the automation engine. We create a lot of our Atlassian content through automation anyway, so would be really cool to be able to extend this and update ownerships in the same rules.

@Tiffany Chung is this something your team have considered?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Note that the Atlassian feature is not the only option to manage content ownership!

We have released the content owner feature in Better Content Archiving 8.8.0 back in 2020. It is also available in the Cloud version of the app, of course.

Notable differences to the Atlassian implementation

Using our app:

• You can assign owners for pages and blog posts, too
• A page or blog post can have zero, one or multiple owners (max 10 right now)  🔥 Having multiple owners is a must in any team larger than a few people
• A page can inherit owners from its ancestor (parent, grandparent, etc.) 🔥If you have well-structured page trees, inheritance makes managing ownership fast and consistent! 
• Page owners are available as CQL fields 🔥 you can search for pages owned by you, by a specific user, etc. using structured CQL queries
• Page owners can be emailed by custom notifications 🔥 e.g. if the page expires, email its owners and encourage an update!
• Page owners can be read or written through the Confluence Cloud REST API (they are stored as standard content properties)

[Ms_ Hiller]

Awesome. But a bulk option is needed.

[C Abone]

It's good to see that this feature has finally been implemented. Thanks @Tiffany Chung .

Hopefully, the bulk update option will be added soon.

[Darrel Jackson]

Is the page owner queryable in the Page Properties Report Macro? Currently the page owner and page status in our pages are in a Page Properties macro. A page owner feature that isn’t queryable won’t be of use to us. This is a known gap in the recent page status feature.