📁Page archiving is now live in beta on Confluence Cloud!

[#1]

Bored working from home? Pro-tip, use newfound free time to procrasti-clean your Confluence spaces with the new Page Archiving feature, now live in beta on Confluence Standard and Premium.

For those of you who are naturally tidy–you’re an inspiration to all of us. Page archiving will help you continue to keep your spaces clean without worrying about deleting important information.

For those of you a little less like Marie Kondo–we’ve got your back too. With page archiving (now live in beta), nested and bulk archiving (including archive recommendations coming soon to Premium), spring cleaning your way to joy just got a whole lot easier.

How will page archiving improve my Confluence site?

• Reassures your team that content in Confluence is up to date

• Keeps your page tree neat and presentable

• Makes it easier to for people to find what they need when there’s less clutter to dig through
  
  

What happens when a page gets archived?

Archived pages are removed from the page tree, quick search, advanced search, analytics, and editor macros. Links to archived pages still work, but they are labeled as archived and certain actions are disabled. In order to preserve the state of the page at the time of archive, the following actions are disabled: edit, like, move, copy, view in hierarchy, share, add/remove labels, add/edit/delete attachments, add comment (inline and page); like/reply/delete/resolve comments, add/complete/remove tasks, import Word document.

You can find archived pages in the archive section of each space. To navigate to each space’s archive, scroll to the bottom of its page tree.

Who can archive and view archived pages?

Archiving permissions have the same permissions as deleting–anyone who can delete can also archive. Archived pages maintain the permissions they had before archive. You can still access an archived page, but you can’t make changes to the page unless it is unarchived and restored to your space. Archiving is available on all paid Confluence Cloud plans (Standard, Premium).

How do I archive a page?

To archive a page, open the (…) ellipses menu in the top right corner of any page. You will see the option to archive at the bottom of the list, above delete.

This is for cloud, what about server?

Archiving may come to server or DC in the future, but for now you can check out our marketplace for feature-rich apps like Better Content Archiving from Midori and other great solutions!

Other questions? Like always, share them here!

[Christian Wuerdig]

Please also create an "Archived Pages" macro so a list of archived pages can be included on a page. Should be able to filter by space and page labels

[Joe White]

My company's admins are pretty protective of "Delete" permissions, because they don't want to lose content. "Archive" sounds like something they might be more willing to let people do, but you're making it impossible. Why reuse the Delete permission for something that isn't actually deleting? Why not have a "can Archive but not Delete" permission?

Also, why would you disable "Copy" on archived pages? That seems like an odd choice.

[hilarydub]

@Joe White this is great feedback. We're actually updating the permissions this week to have a separate permission for archiving for precisely this reason. For context, we started with the simplest technical implementation in order to unblock the release, (and smaller user set as we work out the kinks in the feature) and our next step is to expand the permissions for archiving to be separate from Delete. We are also going to allow users with Create permission to archive their own content.

[hilarydub]

@Christian Wuerdig thanks for the suggestion! Can you give a bit more detail as to why you want this macro? How would you and your team use it?

[Simon Logan]

Is this feature generally available, or do we need to request access?

Is there a more thorough tutorial?

[Christian Wuerdig]

@hilarydubWe have pages that are only valid for a certain period of time - for example a Release checklist that is a living document during a Release. Once it's done and dusted the page becomes less useful but it clutters up the page tree. Archive page is perfect since it removes it without deleting it but it's not that easy to find specific archived pages since you have to trawl through the list.

Occasionally it's useful to be able to easily go back and look up something specific - so I wanted to add a section like "Previous releases" at the bottom of our Release process page for example.

[Luke]

Functionally on-point but highlights a serious problem:  Why do I need to buy lots of add-ons for basic building block features like hunting through and identifying 10000s of old pages?

The recommended/highlighted plugin, Better Contect Archiving, costs anywhere between $10-$2890 for 1st year, depending on users - all just to figure out page usage so I can make a better informed decision on where I should start to clean up a confluence space.

I want to buy plugins to solve big rock issues, instead of fixing or coding around every small management, maintenance or collaboration piece I need to do - this is a hidden cost issue for me.

[Philippe Lassalle]

I am missing the capacity to archive a page and its nested pages. Since we rely on hierarchy to organize our content, archiving a page very often implies archiving the entire hierarchy.

I would expect to choose to archive all nested pages or none at least. A more complete version would be to select the nested pages I want to archive. 

Do you plan such an improvement?

[Susan Moore]

Agree with Phillippe Lassalle. We need to be able to archive the parent and its nested pages. 

[Arsheen Banu Syed]

Hi,

How long will the archived page is available in the archive section? 

[Deleted user]

I agree with Philippe Lassalle. As long as I have to archivate every single nested pages this Archive is useless for us. We have a page that we nemed "Archive" at the buttom of the List. There I put all the pages with a lot of nested pages by using drag and drop when we don´t need them in our daily work anymore but still want to reach the content.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

all just to figure out page usage so I can make a better informed decision on where I should start to clean up a confluence space.

@luke with all due respect, it is only a tiny subset of the Better Content Archiving app's features!

We call it the Content Quality report, but it is really just one thing.

Some other notable (more significant) features are:

1. Automatic review workflows: based on page's last update (including attachment updates) and its last view, the app can reach out to its author, last modifier, owners, etc. to notify that the content is outdated.
2. They can review and update, review and confirm or archive pages.
3. Pages and page trees can expire on a given date.
4. Pages and page trees can be archived on a given date.
5. When archiving, the app archives large page families while preserving the page hierarchy also in the archive. (Note that Atlassian's feature is focused on single pages.)
6. ...etc.

See the full documentation for more details. 

[Halee Kotara]

I'm very excited about this feature and have already been using it to do some spring cleaning, but I encountered an unpleasant surprise: the archived pages are not removed from the "Children Display" macro.

I have a parent page that only contains that macro as a table of contents for the 10 child pages under it. I archived 5 of the 10 pages. The page tree / left nav correctly shows only the 5 unarchived pages, but the "Child Display" macro still shows all 10.

Ideally...

1. anything archived would not show up under "Children Display", either, and behave according to the same logic as what's driving what displays in the page tree / left nav.
2. there would be an additional setting for the "Children Display" macro that says "Included Archived Pages? Y/N".

[richard.otvos]

I really like the idea, we're currently using an Archived space and move the Archived pages there. One idea though is the option to make archived pages searchable too (but with a clear distinction that  the result is from an archived page).

At a company of 3000 it's virtually impossible to make sure everyone knows that if they searched for something, and it's not there they should go into the archived pages and try to re-search there.

[Steve Rhodes]

yeah this is nice feature and all, for the odd page or two. But manually moving individual pages is a drag. Nice that Midori are here telling us about all the features that a) should be included out of the box and b) arent even available in cloud anyway. We need the feature that @Philippe Lassalle mentioned. Moving whole pages and their nested pages.

While we're here, we need to be able to get a list of pages and see when they were last edited so that we can decide which pages need to be moved.

[hilarydub]

Wow, thank you to everyone for the feedback and engagement! Again, I'd like to emphasize that the feature is in Beta for precisely this reason - we want your feedback as we build out more of the functionality, and the comments here are great validation for our archiving roadmap priorities. 

Our current priorities are as follows:
1. Archive with Nested Pages
2. Include Archived pages in Advanced Search
3. Fix the "Children Display" macro bug (archived pages should not be there!)
4. Bulk Archive focus state
5. Drag n drop into Archive
6. Filtering the archive list

Please continue giving feedback here and in app as we polish up the feature! Depending on feedback, we adjust our priorities to meet your needs, so keep it up. Users like you all help us make the products great so thank you again and don't hesitate to let us know what would help you and your team.

[Alan Lee]

@hilarydubwhere is the separation of permission on the list as mentioned in the comment above by Joe White above or is that way down the list?

[yurymakarychev]

@hilarydub please move up fix of "Children Display" in your list. Any estimates?

[hilarydub]

@Alan Lee separation of permission is merged and behind a feature flag! We will roll it out gradually.

@yurymakarychev Children Display is in progress now and should be shipped to production next week.

[Laura Mattiauda]

Hola, es posible archivar una pagina "padre" con todos sus "hijos"?

Ejemplo:

>Documento padre

• doc 1
• doc 2
• doc 3

Necesitaria  que al mover "Documento padre" se llevara todos los que cuelgan de él (doc 1, doc 2, doc 3).

Intente hacerlo arrastrando el grupo de paginas pero no me lo permite. Desde la opción de la pagina solo archiva la pagina en cuestión.

Necesito poder archivar grandes volumenes de paginas, es bastante trabajoso hacerlo de forma individual.

[Vladimir Zvagolskiy]

Agreed with Philippe Lassalle on archiving hierarchies. In addition, it would be great to retain hierarchies in the archive - flat list of pages in archive  is the blocker for us.

[peter.bettens]

Following: all features mentioned in your priority list are a condition sine qua non!

[Jane Engler]

Great feature, but why do archived pages still appear in the page tree macro? We use that macro a lot for our Wiki's and it is confusing for users to be directed to non-relevant archived pages

[Alexander Fuerth]

I've been waiting for this feature in confluence server version.  We have spaces that exist indefinitely, however certain content within the space should be archived, not deleted. I look forward to seeing this feature in the server version confluence. Thanks!

[Andy Cahill]

Hi @hilarydub, is there a CONFCLOUD issue for the separation of permission feature, or has it been released yet?

I'm keen to start using the page archive, but can't get started since the admins have restricted delete permission.