How to manage personal space creation in Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Since Atlassian enabled the default automatic creation of personal spaces in Confluence Cloud I've been wondering how to manage this as a site admin. There are a number of downsides to automatic creation of personal spaces. One of which is that it takes the default permissions from the regular space creation, which for us means its shared upon creation. Secondly, we end up with a lot of unused personal spaces, which leads to the third and fourth points, that it takes up space on towards your space allocation (250GB in Confluence Cloud Standard) and that when someone leaves the company, they also leave behind this space with no-one to manage it.

So, we decided to disable the automatic creation of spaces. We also decided to use the API and some automation tools to remove the previous space permissions from all the personal spaces that had been created before but this is out of scope for this article.

For new users, I decided that I'd rather create the personal space on demand. The simplest way to create a space for a user is to login as them, but to enable personal space creation I created a group for this. Lets call it Confluence Space Creation. This group will need to be given product access to Confluence after which it will show up in the Global Permissions. Why we can't add the group in the Global Permissions I don't know.

After adding the user to the group, you will then need to login as them and in the menu in the top right, will see the option to create a personal space.

After the space has been named, and created. You can then enter the space settings as the user and optionally remove any default permissions that have been added and switch back to your admin user. After which, the user can be removed from the space creation group, as they have already have a space.

There are a number of issues that need addressing by Atlassian. One is CONFCLOUD-71300 Ability to disable the personal spaces creation automatically.  The second is CONFCLOUD-71286 Ability to disable the sample pages created automatically with the personal spaces The third one is that personal spaces should have a separate default space permissions than regular spaces and that you should be able to add a group at the global permissions page (are there issues for these two?)

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Steve Rhodes This is super-valuable!

How do you solve these two "parts" of the problem? I know that you wrote that this is out of scope, but I think these would interest a lot of readers.

1. "... So, we decided to disable the automatic creation of spaces."
2. "We also decided to use the API and some automation tools to remove the previous space permissions from all the personal spaces that had been created before ..."

[Steven Rhodes]

There is a setting under global permissions in your site that - if set to enabled - automatically generates a personal space for users in a group. You can read more background information in this Community article. 

To disable the setting, remove the Personal space option from the appropriate groups in Confluence Settings > Global Permissions on the user groups tab.

[Andy Gladstone]

@Steve Rhodes thanks for taking the time to share this practice and experience with the community. I'd be interested in a follow-up article about the use of the API to update the existing personal spaces created since this went live almost two years ago.

[Steve Rhodes]

Hi @Andy Gladstone  - we are using an IPaaS solution called Workato which takes the API call for retrieving the personal spaces, 250 at a time: This is the Get Space v2 API

https://<yoursite>.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/spaces?type=personal&status=current&limit=250

We feed the results of this into a results data set and for each group permission. The ID part is a group that is being used in the space permissions. Each group has an ID and we cycle through with this: This is the Get Space Permissions v2 API

https://<yoursite>.atlassian.net/wiki/api/v2/spaces/<ID>/permissions?limit=250

and for every space we delete the group permissions. This is the Remove a Space Permission v1 API

https://<yoursite>.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/space/spacekey/<spacekeyID>/permission/<permissionID>

[Stefan Draber]

Hi @Steve Rhodes 

many thanks for sharing your use case and solution, it helps a lot as we're facing the same situation with personal spaces and default space permissions.

You asked for the ticket with the feature request to provide seperate default permissions for personal spaces, here you go: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-36726 

Plus, I found an almost-workaround to adress this issue via Confluence Automation:

Since there is

• a trigger ‘Space created’ and
• a condition for the smart value space.isPersonal and
• an action to ‘Grant space permission’

additional permissions could easily be granted.

Unfortunately there is no Automation action yet to revoke permissions. If we’ve got this one as well, we could easily build our default personal space permissions with Automation.

@Avinoam maybe this is one for you and your team? As there's already an action for granting permissions, it shouldn't be too hard to add one for revoking them, right? ;)

(text updated due to some strange error message)