Survey results: Renaming space keys in Confluence

[#1]

Hey Community,

We would like to thank the 103 respondents who took the time to share their thoughts and insights on renaming space keys in Confluence. A survey was shared on the public Data Center and Cloud tickets in October 2023, providing invaluable insights that help to shape the implementation of this highly-requested feature. Please read on for an overview of these results, and continue to follow the public tickets for further updates.

1. What conventions are used in your organisation when naming a space key?

• There is a strong association between a space name and the key, with 81.6% of respondents using a space key as an acronym for the space name.

• Approximately 50% of respondents use space keys to associate a space with a related Jira project.

2. Who do you think should be able to edit a space key?

• Unsurprisingly, 96.1% of respondents said a System admin should be able to edit a space key.

• 44.7% of respondents said that Space administrators should be able to edit a space key.

3. Would you expect a space key to be auto-populated when renaming a space?

The majority of respondents would like to configure the space key themselves, rather than having it auto-populated. Space keys should not be auto-populated when renaming a space.

4. A personal space key is determined by the name of the user. When should a personal space key be updated?

• 57.3% of respondents think a personal space key should be updated when triggered by a system admin.

• 51.8% of respondents who said they would like a personal space key update to be triggered by a system admin also said it should be triggered by the personal space owner.

5. Would you ever need to update multiple space names and space keys in bulk?

• The majority of respondents (55.3%) indicated that they needed to update multiple space names and keys in bulk.

• Free text responses indicated that this was most commonly required when either performing instance consolidations or reflecting changes to organisational and/or team names.

6. What do you use space keys for?

Space keys are used for a variety of reasons, such as identifying the space a page is from, identifying a space by its URL, searching for a space or even referencing the space when talking with colleagues.

Conclusions

Thanks to the survey responses, we have been able to better understand how customers use space keys and the requirements for renaming them. Space keys support a variety of use cases and are typically used to represent space names, project names or an associated Jira project. It is important that system administrators are able to update space keys, and it is also important to some respondents that space admins are also able to do so. A minority of respondents indicated that space admins should be able to update space keys, so this could be a configurable setting.

Given that updating space keys could potentially impact things like links, updating them should be an infrequent event, so it is important that a new space key isn’t automatically populated when renaming a space - a person should be able to input the new key. Finally, supporting bulk updates is important when either performing instance consolidations or reflecting changes to organisational or team names.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to share their insights with us. The valuable findings and additional details from your comments have been instrumental in informing and enhancing our solution. Please continue to follow CONFSERVER-2085 and CONFCLOUD-2085 for updates.

Please be aware that, at this time, our strategic focus lies in fortifying our security framework even further. We are actively integrating industry best practices and introducing new features to bring you the most secure Confluence yet.

Charlie Marriott

Confluence Data Center

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Hi @Charlie Marriott 

I appreciate the detailed write up on the findings of your user research, but what's really frustrating is that:

• The research to "understand customer needs" was done in 2023, when the JAC was opened in 2004
• The JAC already has 1180 votes, 573 watchers and a pile of comments where your customers have taken the time to outline their use cases, highlighting the pain caused by not having the ability to re-key spaces
• I fail to see what significant value the user research sessions have provided over and above a few graphs showing a slightly different weighting compared to the same insights if you extracted them from the JAC itself
• What IS apparent from both the JAC and the UX research - your users REALLY want this feature - yet the outcome is STILL that you're not going to actually deliver on it any time soon. Not even COMMIT to a timeline when you MAY deliver it
• I am all for security, but if a product isn't usable/maintainable, who cares how secure it is - users won't use it, and a system without data in it is secure anyway.

CCM

[Maurice Pasman]

I have been changing space keys forever using this procedure: https://instant27001.com/support/change-space-key/ :)