📣 We’re giving you a personal space…automatically!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

My name is Avni Barman, and I’m a Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team. We’re excited to announce that all Confluence users will now receive a personal space! If you do not have a personal space today, you will automatically receive one, over the coming weeks, once you are active within Confluence. However, if your admin has disabled personal spaces for your instance, you will not get one.

Read on to learn more about what a personal space is and all the things you can do with it. (If you're an admin check out another article we have written about how you can get the most out of customizing personal spaces for your site alongside other FAQs!)

What is a personal space?

A personal space is an area in your Confluence site that is automatically created for you to store everything you're working on individually. This may include your to-do lists, musings about important ideas and strategies, or the polishing of content before it’s moved into a shared space. Your personal space is completely under your control, from who can view the page (if anyone) to what types of content reside there.

How do I use my personal space?

How you decide to use your personal space and what you decide to craft there is totally up to you! That’s the power of your personal space — it’s a safe place for you to unleash the power of your thoughts and ideas without impacting any other team member’s workflow. Here are some ideas of how you can use your personal space for the most benefit:

• introduce yourself and add a bit about who you are and how you work

• brainstorm new thoughts and ideas

• create to-do lists of important things to remember

• jot down quick meeting notes

• …and much more!

This feature is rolling out in the next few weeks so if you don’t see a personal space in your Confluence Cloud instance today, it should be coming to you soon. We hope you enjoy! Leave any feedback below in the comments and stay tuned for more announcements!

[Curt Holley]

Hi @Avni Barman 

Are you saying that personal Spaces will be generated for all that do not have currently across all Cloud instances whether that is desired (by the person or the Organisation) or not?

Should this not be something that is controllable for each Organisation?

It would make a great offering to incorporate such control into this functionality [CONFCLOUD-71300] Ability to disable the personal spaces creation automatically - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

I.E. Make it so Admins can control whether all new users get a personal space by default and also offer the ability to create personal spaces for all without, retrospectively.

But as this appears to be happening....how will users know/be made aware that they have a personal space all of a sudden? Presumably the permissions on these spaces will be the same (open) as the ones auto-generated for new users currently?

[Neeraj]

Agree with Curt above. Having the ability to create a personal space is great (if you want it), but why force it down on everyone? 

Also, what happens to these spaces, if the user is simply unlicensed vs. decommissioned? I'm also concerned about any administrative burden this will bring.

[Jeanne Howe]

This is not something that should be forced down our throats. We intentionally disabled the creation of personal spaces and do NOT want our users creating personal spaces. We already have over 150 spaces that users have to navigate through (since Confluence does not allow any kind of space hierarchy) now your going to force down another 2000+ spaces?!

Are you serious? What is wrong with you. How about giving us back all of the functionality you have removed in the last 3 years instead. THAT is what we want.

[Daniel Sputa]

please don't. really. who asked for this? Why do you even focus on a feature like this instead of fixing some other horrendous issues that this platform has?

[Matt Wasserman]

So when users log in to Confluence they are going to see x + y spaces, where x is the spaces they actually need to see and y is the number of employees we have. This is awesome - the larger we grow, the harder it becomes for users to see what they need to see.

I spent months convincing management to use Confluence as our default document repo. Thanks for making me look foolish.

[sdion@drivingforce.ca]

How do I turn this off Globally ? 

[Geza Kukoda]

Oh my god...

And where can I turn off personal space once and for all?

[Shari Barchus]

Many organizations do not allow Personal Spaces in Confluence!!! And for good reason.  Please consider making this an OPTIONAL feature or leave it as-is.

[Peter Sarkar]

I actually just went through and archived/removed user's personal spaces, and now you are going to undo all that work.  Please re-consider a more sensible roll-out.

[Jing Chen]

Please make this feature optional! We intentionally disable the creation of spaces. This "feature" will add a lot of administrative burden! 

[Silvia D]

I would prefer a different default for the creation of personal spaces: neither automatic nor public

[S. Francoeur]

To add to the above, we have visitors and team members as licensed users. How can we prevent non-team members from creating a personal space using the (global) Default Personal Space Content system template we customized for our team members?

Quick everyone! Let's vote for :

• [CONFCLOUD-71300] Ability to disable the personal spaces creation automatically (currently at 93 votes) and
• [CONFCLOUD-71286] Ability to disable the sample pages created automatically with the personal spaces (currently at 23 votes)

[dave_drexler]

I think this is an awful idea.

We spend lots of time convincing people to COLLABORATE, which means doing work transparently and in public view. I can't tell you how many times I've told people that, unlike other systems that encourage users to work privately and share with just a few colleagues, Confluence encourages public sharing and working together. I also strongly discourage restricting content to security, personnel, or financial information. Private or personal spaces and restricted content are antithetical to using a wiki.

Can this 'feature' be easily turned off?

[Tom Kraft]

Will there be a way for admins to add custom fields? I would like to have specific fields with select menus and questions with text fields to fill out.

[Mark Thompson]

So still waiting for someone to say they love this.  I 100% don't.  

You need to discuss these types of changes with actual admins that manage projects.  I'll echo everyone else that this is a horrible idea.  Who makes these decisions?  I can't believe the majority of admins would want the auto creation of information that people don't use or want.  Please make this disabled by default.   I mean you are literally doing things multiple times a year that alienate your admins.

[Avni Barman]

Thank you so much for all your feedback. Yes, you can go ahead and disable the creation of personal spaces in admin settings. We are not changing that feature.

Additionally, there is no additional admin effort or maintenance. We will respect existing permissions and ensure that instances with personal spaces disabled will not have them automatically created for their users. However, if you do get a personal space created for you, we will let you know in product! 

Please let us know if you have any other concerns, feedback, or questions! 

[Chase Whitener]

While we thank you for allowing us to turn off the ability to make personal spaces, that doesn't quite sound like it will solve the problem you're creating here.

We want people to be able to create personal spaces should they need to do so. We don't want them AUTO-created for everyone without reason.

Please do not add this misfeature!

[Mark Thompson]

Agree with @Chase Whitener - Sounds like you are rolling out this feature anyway.  Please don't.  This is a horrible idea.  Admins need to be in control and you are taking that control away by auto adding personal spaces in any org where spaces are allowed.  Why post info here for users if you are going to do whatever you want anyway?

[Tom Kraft]

As I mentioned above, we would like to have our own company specific fields in the personal spaces so it would be userful to our organization. Can the admin add custom fields?

[Lenard Fudala]

Additionally, there is no additional admin effort or maintenance.

@Avni Barman Actually, that is exactly what you are adding is additional admin effort and maintenance.

[Ulises Ignacio Meza Dominguez]

Estoy de acuerdo en tener algo así, Vamos a probar la importancia de esto. 

[Karen Waters - External]

This was previously a bug and we ended up with 1000s of personal spaces no one used and had to go through a lot to get them all removed. Not sure why this is a great idea now. Please dont

[dave_drexler]

A coupla (perhaps rhetorical) questions:

• Was this really a demanded change? We already had the ability to allow personal spaces, and there are important, very broken features in the backlog that have languished for years with hundreds of votes. How did this one get prioritized?
• Isn't Atlassian's whole shtick 'collaboration'? The 'CO' part of that word means 'together.' How does making it easier for people to work in their own personal silos fit into that philosophy? 

[Matt Wasserman]

@Avni BarmanI don't see a setting to disable personal spaces. I can control which permission levels can create them, but now Atlassian is creating them for the users so that becomes useless.

If I am missing something and there are instructions for disabling personal spaces globally, thus preventing the automatic creation of them, please post a link here. Thanks.

[Matthew Stone]

My employer has disabled the ability to create private spaces in the hosted version of Confluence. However, I have opened my own personal account in Confluence Cloud to collaborate on a personal project.

The two accounts are completely separate, and I don't log in to my personal account using a work computer. Is this the type of usage you have in mind?