Generally speaking, we use Confluence at an organizational level - the source of truth for the entire org (not just R&D). This philosophy doesn't align with what I see in the Atlassian - Confluence publications that focus on the team level, not the organizational level. This causes us many challenges when finding solutions.
We have a space that serves as the "Intranet" and a landing page for the entire organization and several other spaces that also serves all of the org. We educate the employees to watch those spaces and try not to spam them, so they will not ignore important publications. We publish things that do not necessarily need to be notified immediately or separately in private mode and then release the permission lock to overcome the notification issue. Once in a while, with a major update, we do notify. By the way, we have another issue now that there is the daily digest. Because if there is something important that we do notify about, the notification appears as part of the daily digest, and we can't separate it, so we need to send a specific email with a link. Recently we opened a ticket to your support to see if we can exclude specific spaces from the daily digest at a site level.
I also would like for the site admin to be able to register all the employees to watch specific spaces that are considered a must in the organization.
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@Fletcher Richman I'm not sure what use case @Tami Dubi has, but, for me, I want to publish without notifying others because you need to publish a page in order to do things like:
make a child page under it
make a link to the page from another page
As I am using Confluence to create a user guide for one of our products, I set up my outline (page structure) first with draft pages that just contain the page title and the boilerplate text of my template. Whenever I need to link to one of those pages as I write up another page, I have to publish the page. It is not in a state that anyone else needs to know about at that point.
Hi @Lingyang Zhu,do you have any news regarding the option to publish without notifying watchers? With the old publishing workflow it was possible to not notify watchers AND record a version comment at the same time. Unfortunately this is no longer the case (When publishing without notifying watcher I can not leave a version comment).
It would be really helpful if you could re-introduce this option, e.g. by adding the notify checkbox suggested in a previous comment.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 22, 2023 edited
@Tami Dubi For your point on the daily digest- we are going to expand out your options within the email settings page. So by October, you should be able to separate notifications that come in real time vs. those in Digest. As an example you can have new pages/blogs created be part of your digest, and you can instruct users to also turn on real time notifications so they can have both or neither. The same goes for edit/update notifications as well. Hope that this is a good workaround in the meantime.
If you are in the middle of the development, please take into consideration the following:
1. We are working on an organizational level, so asking all of our employees (800) to do something manually isn't realistic. Please give the admins a way of handling it from a site level so we can enforce the organizational governance and standardize the behavior.
2. All-or-nothing is not a good solution. We don't want to spam our employees, and I think the daily digest is great for 90% of the cases. However, we do want to be able to specify specific spaces from which the notifications will be immediate and separated. And also the ability to do so for the entire ord or for specific teams.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 23, 2023 edited
Hi @Brat , @Tami Dubi , @Harsh ! Thank you for your interest in this new feature and your insightful feedback regarding how you use Confluence and our Notify Watcher settings.
We hear your need for more control and accessibility to "Publish without Notifying Watchers." I have madethis JAC ticketcapturing the essence of your suggestions and would encourage you to up vote, watch, and/or provide more context in the comments of this ticket.
We are actively gathering feedback and discussing solutions that holistically meet the needs of both creators, editors, and those users whom have chosen to "watch" spaces and pages alike.
What would be great is if "Publish without notifying Watchers" could be set as a default. It's annoying to have to open that separate menu now, and it will continue to be annoying because it's still a separate menu after this change. We don't need those notifications, and when someone forgets to take the extra step for it, we end up with useless notifications cluttering our channels.
For my normal use case "Create page and publish" this is an additional step and actually just slows me down (since I know where I'm creating pages and want to publish them, and I know I have to set the access if I want it limited)...feel like the edge cases (for those that are not familiar with Confluence) are in control here :(
I too am very concerned about the removal of the option to notify others. Our employees are trained i) to only notify others if the change is consequential, to avoid spamming watchers with changes to pages and ii) to save with version comments. We can no longer do this and it is a significant degradation to usability.
In the past when I edited an existing page I would add a version comment but uncheck the box for notifying watchers. Now that this release has hit my instance I can't figure out how to do that now. From what I can tell I only have two options:
Update without notifying watchers (under the action button) which does not allow me to enter a version comment
Use the arrow on the Update button and enter a version comment but trigger notification to watchers
Am I missing something or did the ability to enter version comment and not notify watchers get removed?
@Nancy Shao Why was the ability to publish an update with a version comment but without notifying watchers removed? This was a very useful feature for us, and it is confusing that it was completely removed - rather than leaving it as a menu option!
Much like @Rick Westbrock, we would constantly update without notifying watchers but adding a version comment. I am sure you would agree that version comments are essential for good versioning as they allow you to create a changelog by labeling each version. However, sometimes I want to make an important change and label it but also want to avoid inundating my coworkers with email notifications. This was such a basic feature of our Confluence workflow, and it feels like it took more effort on Confluence's part to remove it rather than keep it as an option.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 30, 2023 edited
Hi all - After several discussions internally, we are adding the notify watchers via email option back to the update dialog, it will show up for the subsequent updates.
There's nothing you need to do, the option will show up in the update dialog in the next few days. Thank you for your patience!
Agree with @Brat (Jul 27, 2023). "Update without notifying watchers" is not under "Update". Just updated bunch of pages with minor changes spamming everyone.
We requested that the "without notification" option to the first publishing phase.
As for updates, the "without notification" still exists just under the 3 dots. There isn't any impact of moving it under the update button. It will only take longer. Another option is to create a short keyboard string like (command e for edit) to make our job easier.
This is so annoying (for a user that knows what he's doing) to get this dialog every time...can you please make this an opt-in or add an opt-out so I can remove this annoying pop up every time I publish a new page ;)
I appreciate that Atlassian has listened to user feedback on this one and is adding the "don't notify watchers" option to the update options dialog. This is in stark contrast to the Jira team renaming a menu option to "View all issues" when it really just takes you to the search issues page; a large number of customers complained about how renaming that has confused users but Atlassian hasn't really responded to customer feedback on that problem.
the issue is I don't want everyone to be able to publish, only the already established editors which are in the page permissions, we have our list of editors and these people can create new articles and edit them.
Requiring us to choose "only some can edit" means that we need to specify editors for every publication henceforth?
What happens if I schedule something to publish and someone else modifies the same page and publishes it? Would it also publish my update, or would it wait until the scheduled date?
We work with new products and sometimes don't want everyone to see the content until a certain date, but it would be nice to have it automatically update on that date.
On a similar note, is there a way to schedule a change to a page's permissions? Currently I have the page locked to a select group of people, then I unlock it when I want broader access. It would be great if I could schedule this.
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