Automate Page Review and Approval Workflow in Confluence

[Khaled Abdelfattah]

Hello,

I would like to create an automation workflow in Confluence (using the automation tools available in the standard plan) to streamline the process of requesting page reviews and approvals.

The goal is to make this process intuitive and user-friendly for anyone in the organization. Below is my suggested approach:

1. Requesting a Review:

   • The page creator enters the name of the reviewer/approver (e.g., via a dropdown or other easy-to-use input method).
   • The selected reviewer is notified (e.g., via email or Confluence notifications).
   • The page status is updated to "Ready for Review."

2. Creating a Jira Ticket:

   • Optionally, a Jira ticket can be automatically created and assigned to the reviewer for tracking purposes.

3. Approval Process:

   • Once the reviewer changes the page status to "Approved" or completes the Jira ticket, a comment is automatically added to the page indicating the status update.

Key Concerns:

• How can we enable the page creator to select the reviewer/approver’s name or account easily (e.g., from a dropdown)?
• How can we ensure the Jira ticket is created with the approver automatically assigned?

Please confirm if this workflow is feasible or suggest alternative approaches if necessary.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Khaled Abdelfattah Do you realize that there is an upper limit, 100 automation rule executions per month, if you use the Standard plan? This is not too much to be honest... Depending on how many pages to review there are in average per month and how many other automations you created, it may be sufficient or not.

The only way to go above 100 execution is upgrading to the Premium plan.

Also, let me know that there are third party apps that offer review workflows with automatic statuses, notifications, reports, page lists and such. We develop this app that offers all these features and more.

[Khaled Abdelfattah]

A limit of 100 automation rules per month seems like a good starting point, provided we manage them efficiently. The key challenge here is that most of the current options aren't particularly effective for streamlining the review and approval process. -- It seems we cannot do this without using a plugin.

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY]

Hi @Khaled Abdelfattah

As you mentioned, the native Confluence features are rather limited for establishing a streamlined review and approval process. That is because you don't have dedicated UIs and views for all pages to review, content reports, the selection of approvers, and so on.

If you are looking for a plugin that brings review and approval workflows to Confluence Cloud, you might take a look at Breeze.

Breeze will solve your problems 1 (Requesting a Review) and 3 (Approval Process). However, a proper solution for 2 (Creating a Jira Ticket) will be difficult to achieve for any Confluence app because of missing possibilities to link between different Atlassian products (Confluence and Jira) from within one app.

If you want to learn more about Breeze and its review and approval workflows, you can try it for free or schedule a personal demo with me to see how it works.

Cheers, and all the best,
Adrian from B1NARY (we are the developers of Breeze)

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Hi @Khaled Abdelfattah ,

When talking about Manual trigger, currently it's not possible to add custom user fields or user picker field type; see open feature suggestion: AUTO-744: Improve "Manual trigger from issue" to support more ways to capture user input - custom issue fields, user picker field type, ability to access fields via smart values, multi-select fields, date/time fields 

You could replicate this by adding a prompt Dropdown (Select List) field, but that would mean someone would need to manually update these values each time someone joins or leaves the company.

Additionally, you could leverage smart buttons in Confluence, but I don't think it would cover all requirements from your side.
From what I've heard, soon you'll be able to create custom smart buttons, but that might be a long shot as well.

Until this feature request for manual trigger is created, you could check out Atlassian Marketplace. Maybe something like Approvals for Confluence would be a good fit (I've never used it so cannot be sure).

As a workaround, maybe users could run a manual trigger which would create Jira issue, and on that Jira issue same user would pick another user as approver. Note that this would mean that the user requesting approval would also need a Jira license.

These are just top of mind ideas, but feel free to ask if you'd like more info.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Tobi

[Khaled Abdelfattah]

It seems the only viable solution I can implement is to manually trigger the creation of a Jira task with a review process. From there, users can continue as needed. While this approach works for a simple review process, it does require users to navigate between two apps just to initiate the process 😓.

I previously tried using the Page Approval for Confluence plugin but stopped when it moved to the Premium plan. Since we're currently on the Standard plan, upgrading the entire platform to Premium just to use this plugin isn't a practical option.

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Hi @Khaled Abdelfattah - yeah. Switching between two platform could be a 'workaround' until more effective solution is released. 😕

Regarding the following:

Since we're currently on the Standard plan, upgrading the entire platform to Premium just to use this plugin isn't a practical option.

You don't need to upgrade the product plan to Premium in order to use/buy app(s). But, apps can be somewhat expensive - depending on the number of users your instance has. Therefore, some people decide to implement native solutions instead of using addons.

[Khaled Abdelfattah]

Update: I saw the option for a "Manual trigger from page" — how can this be leveraged to allow users to choose a real user from a dropdown list?