Get the most out of personal spaces and make them work for your site

[#1]

Dear Admins,

Recently, we announced that all Confluence users will now receive a personal space, over the coming weeks after they are active on Confluence.

We believe this is an amazing opportunity for admins to help users get the most out of their Confluence site. We see that sites that have personal spaces today have higher creation activity and engagement. With personal spaces, users are able to:

1. learn the ins and outs of how to use Confluence in the safety of their own space

2. create more content that wouldn’t otherwise have a natural place on Confluence

3. be much more engaged on their site

However, we understand that not all admins may want this functionality. We hear your feedback and understand where you are coming from. We believe this feature will deliver significant value to our customers while respecting the choices of admins who do need more control.

If you have already disabled personal spaces for your user groups, then we will respect that choice, and we won’t enable this feature for your users. (Check out the original announcement here to learn more about the change and how to use your personal space.)

FAQs

I still do not want this feature. What can I do?

No worries. Feel free to disable it by heading over to your Site Settings > Global permissions and editing the personal space setting for any and all user groups that you do not want to receive it. With this setting, your end-users will not be able to create a personal space on their own.

How will my users be made aware that they now have a personal space?

If the user does not already know that they have a personal space, we will be notifying them in-product where to access it and how to use it.

Who gets a personal space?

If a user has permission to receive a personal space, then they are eligible for a personal space. Once a user becomes active on Confluence and views a page, we will automatically generate one for them.

What happens if the user is simply unlicensed or inactive?

If a user is unlicensed or inactive, we will never give them a personal space.

What additional admin effort or maintenance does this bring?

There is ZERO additional effort or maintenance necessary as we will be respecting current admin permissions. If you already have personal spaces disabled for your user groups, then there will be no change to your site, and we will respect all current permissions.

How can I sift through the noise of personal spaces if I am only interested in looking at team spaces? How do I stay organized?

Select Spaces in the global navigation bar and select View all spaces. Filter through your spaces by selecting the Communal category. This way you can view all team and project spaces without including personal spaces in the list.

How can a user delete their own personal space?

Any user can go ahead and delete their own personal space and we will never automatically generate a For more information on how to delete your space, visit our documentation here.

How does this change fit into Atlassian’s model of maintaining a single source of truth for knowledge management & project collaboration?

Every team starts with the individual. We believe that providing a place for a user to call their own is extremely important to help empower our users to build confidence in our product and eventually share more of their work with their team. By supporting more jobs and use cases, Confluence can continue to be an indispensable knowledge and collaboration layer for every team within your organization.

Will this change affect the price or cost of my site?

Nope! No matter how many users you have, the number of personal spaces generated will not affect your bill or license size.

Will this change impact the performance of my site?

No, there will be no impact.

[Jeanne Howe]

Once again Atlassian has NOT listened to a single piece of feed back from ANY of its users.

Turning off a users ability to create a personal space is NOT a resolution. Some customers would like the OPTION of allowing users to create a personal space without having these spaces created AUTOMATICALLY by ATLASSIAN.

If I wanted Atlassian to administer and support my instance of Confluence I'd assign you a user account and provide you with the appropriate permissions. Short of that, stay out. You are not our admin and do not have permissions to create spaces without our consent.

[Rodney Hughes]

[Edited for Rules of Engagement violations]

@Avni Barman 

No!, No!, No!

I agree with @Jeanne Howe  .. you are not listening and/or understanding!!

What you believe (heaven only knows where that belief came from) is 

"an amazing opportunity" 

is NOT!

Some of us may in fact agree that Personal Spaces are VERY HELPFUL to our Users.
There is no argument about that.

The feedback on the original post https://tinyurl.com/2h8k8mk is crystal clear!

THERE WAS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE OLD SYSTEM!

So don't change it.

🤦‍♂️

To be clear .... The old system was:
IF   ... that is a  BIG IF ... the Admins have decided to allow Personal Spaces, we want our Users TO BE ABLE to decide ALL BY THEMSELVES if ... that is a second BIG IF ... they want a Personal Space.

That worked PEREFCTLY FINE!
As the saying goes "If it isn't broken, don't fix it!"

In your comments above you state this revised new system is:

"Once a user becomes active on Confluence and views a page, we will automatically generate one for them."

Your original proposed solution AND this half baked half step back is precisely what we (VEHEMENTLY) DON'T want

To be clear, where the Admins have chosen to allow Personal Spaces, we do NOT WANT your system to AUTOMATICALLY create a personal Space for them!

PLEASE .. STOP mucking around with features that work.

Get back to reinstating all the CLOUD Editor features that you destroyed or removed when you changed the Editor!!

Again ... just give us back what we had!!

[Ben Shuker]

Agree with the comments so far.

I don't want to turn personal spaces off globally, I just don't want them created by default.

[Mark Thompson]

Again agree with what is posted.  Personal spaces should be allowed just don't automatically create them for all users.  

[Rodney Hughes]

@Avni Barman 

I just had what I believe to be a good idea and a good opportunity for ATLASSIAN ...

"What is good for the goose is good for the gander!"

Just like your revised new system you are forcing us to have, for every User in this Community, when they view any page, you automatically create a whole Space for them in this system where you are the Admin.

I wonder how long before you want to turn off the automatic creation?

[Curt Holley]

@Ben Shuker @Mark Thompson 

You can achieve allow, but don't create as per the screenshot in this post. untick "personal Space" for all the relevant groups and tick "Create Space"....again, for relevant groups.

This way, personal spaces will not be created for new users, or IF Atlassian roll out this bulk update. But people within the groups with "Create Space", will still be able to create personal spaces for those that require/desire it.

[Rodney Hughes]

[Edited for Rules of Engagement violations]

@Curt Holley 

that still sounds like more work for us Admins 👎

The good old system did not require any of that 

and to note ... the proposed revised new system said above

Once a user becomes active on Confluence and views a page, we will automatically generate one for them.

that means even an existing User will suddenly be given a Personal Space just because they looked at the system!!

We just don't want Atlassian automatically creating any Personal Spaces on "just because"

... and in our system we don't allow our  general Users to create Spaces .. other than the single click they used to have to create their own Personal Space

This must be revoked

[Curt Holley]

@Rodney Hughes 

I agree, it's a "stupid idea".

But, I believe the below only applies if the Personal Space setting is ticked for your users "group/s". If not ticked, it won't happen.  So checking a few tick boxes once is hardly an admin overhead. 

Once a user becomes active on Confluence and views a page, we will automatically generate one for them

@Avni Barman Can you confirm please?

[Ben Shuker]

@Curt Holley that's exactly what I did this morning, the problem is I shouldn't have needed to:

• Create a new group
• Add users I want to be able to create a space to the group
• Change the global permissions to prevent anyone else from creating a personal space

I now also have another group that I have to manage and add or remove users from.

It should just be left as is where users can create a personal space, IF they want to.

There's still going to be more clean up for me once this happens which I'm not looking forward to.

Please @Avni Barman, at the very least delay this roll out while you consult with your clearly unhappy customers and ask us what it is we actually want. 

[richard.lane]

Re the "create space" hack @Curt Holley suggested doesn't really solve the problem, because now those users can also create FULL SPACES and OMG, many of us don't want to be handing that permission out to large groups of people.

[richard.lane]

[Edited for Rules of Engagement violations]

@Avni Barman 

Remember that the point of Product Managers is to imagine what your users want and then give it to them? You're not going to get that right every time, and that's fine.

Over 90% of the feedback on this idea is "Please oh my god don't do it!"

• You had an idea.
• You told your customers about it.
• Almost everyone who bothered to respond hates it.
• A few people who don't have to deal with admin and compliance overheads wonder why hate it and think we're over-reacting. 
• Zero people think it is a good idea.

Stop being Principal Skinner and saying "Am I out of touch? No, it's the customers who are wrong!"

Many of us (e.g. me) are reluctantly putting up with the fact that the limited number of staff who know Confluence well enough to want a personal space for content testing can do that. So right now, BECAUSE IT IS OPTIONAL AND OBSCURE, I let people make personal spaces. 

If this change actually goes ahead, I'll have to disable personal spaces globally. And I'll also have to stop turning a blind eye to my power users who do use their personal space and tell them to move the content away before I delete them globally.

As as the guy who pays the (six figure) Atlassian bill and decides what SaaS tools we use, attitudes like this are why I keep wondering why I don't move the company onto the alternatives that aren't actively hostile to the DevSecOps people who have to run the platforms.

[richard.lane]

@Avni Barman 

Short version: Just add a checkbox for "Create automatic personal spaces". Default = off. Problem solved.

Bonus: Instant metric of how many customers think this feature is so good that they're willing to log on to the admin portal to tick a single checkbox. 

[Marcus]

In our instance we have 76 users and I counted 26 regular spaces in total as well as some personal spaces. When this rolls out we will basically drown in the abundance of personal spaces. Can somebody confirm what happens when you uncheck the "Personal Space" for a specific group please - since some of our users use their personal space, I don't want to uncheck it only for it to delete all personal spaces that currently exists.

Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Please understand Atlassian, you are constantly making things worse for us.

[Rodney Hughes]

@Avni Barman 

We hope you have understood .. we are all desperate to hear that you cancel roll out of this PROBLEM!  Even in this modified problem format.  A problem is still a problem.

[Marc Koppelaar]

Hi @Avni Barman

Same here. We have around 900 personal spaces, but around 4000 users.

When this rolls out we will basically drown in personal spaces. 

This feature should not be coming, we don't want.need automated creation of Personal Spaces.

[Daniel Cave]

@Avni Barman  

Your solution to disabling this feature is not actually covering the problem. You are basically saying that Atlassian's official answer to end-user personal spaces is, either the admin creates them or they will be automatically created.

I am disappointed with your response to the feedback you have received. Our 4000+ end-users will have a more negative experience because of the decision you have made to push through despite numerous admins telling you to reconsider.

We will take this into account for future business reviews of your products.

[Rodney Hughes]

@Avni Barman 

Please understand ...

We still want the ability for our Users to create their own Personal Spaces.

We DO NOT WANT Atlassian to automatically create a Personal Space for the User.

SIMPLE!

Leave it as it has always been.

There is no need to waste Atlassian Development Team's time creating a feature that will be a problem for us.

[Paula Hidalgo]

@Avni Barman I have not seen this mention BUT is very important to confluence admins -- users who become inactive have a personal space left behind.  With this new auto creation of personal space announced, decided to do an inventory of personal spaces left behind by inactive users.  There were 554 spaces (we have 6K licenses).  I did clean up and wrote a script to delete all those abandoned spaces.

Interesting the answer to "Will this change affect the price or cost of my site?" is Nope! No matter how many users you have, the number of personal spaces generated will not affect your bill or license size.

It may not impact the license size BUT I will reach the storage limit faster because there are so many useless spaces created by this feature.  Increasing the storage limit DOES impact cost!

[Rodney Hughes]

[Edited for Rules of Engagement violations]

Avni was kind enough to have a 15 minute ZOOM with me this morning. 

She is going to give my feedback to the Development Team.

If you have already commented on this or original post   https://tinyurl.com/2h8k8mk you should be kept informed of any response

[Rodney Hughes]

Atlassian have advised me that some of my comments here have offended in some way as being abusive and/or have an inappropriate tone.

Where that has been the case I offer my sincere and unqualified apology.

Atlassian have rightfully edited those comments. 👌

[Logan Rhodehamel]

The end result of this change for our company will probably be to prohibit personal spaces going forward. My preference would be to allow people to create personal spaces if they choose, but due to this new "feature" that will not be possible. The added administration overhead and space clutter is a major concern. The product manager has stated multiple times there is not an added overhead but this is simply not true - where before a personal space must be cleaned up in 1 out of 10 cases of employee turnover, now it will have to be done every time. Or, we can disallow the feature, save the 1 out of 10 cases of additional work, and keep using Confluence for public documentation.

[Rodney Hughes]

Just wondering .... given all this feedback and time, has Atlassian decided to cancel the roll out of this "anti‑feature"?

[Jessie Wang_ScriptRunner_The Adaptavist Group]

Hi everyone, if you’re interested in a way to automatically archive all unused personal spaces on your instance, we’ve added a new script to do this.

You’ll need the ScriptRunner for Confluence app and this script from our Script Library. When you copy and paste the script into the app and run it, it will find and archive all the unused personal spaces on your instance.

You can set the script to run on a fixed schedule (called a ‘Script Job’) so unused personal spaces get continuously archived in batches until your whole instance is done.

As you can probably tell, I work on the ScriptRunner team :).

For anyone who’s interested, ScriptRunner for Confluence is free for up to 10 users, otherwise, you can take advantage of the 30-day free trial to run the script.

Hope that helps anyone who needs it. Any questions or concerns feel free to reach out to me.

Jessie

[Jack Brickey]

The feature is rolling out now it seems with some folks posing about how to disable. 😣

I agree that there should be a global auto-create field and should default to off.

[Martin Cleaver]

The auto-create personal spaces slams sites used by mobile users as at least on iPhone there is no way to only show communal spaces and no company hub. In our case, we have 5 useful spaces lost in a forest of 20+ personal empty spaces.

So now I've disabled personal spaces (tough luck if they want one) and I'm off to do a clear-up.