Creating "please review your content" notifications to page owners

[Hank Church]

Would like to know the processes for setting up notifications (in both email and Slack) to Confluence page owners that specific pages that they own are due for review.

[Trev Angle]

Hi @Hank Church, this is Trevor Angle from the Confluence automation team. I looked through some of the discussion on this post and wanted to add some additional suggestions/context.

If the core problem is that inactive pages are not getting reviewed/updated, the "for each inactive page" branch may solve your problem. You can configure it with a timeframe over which it will find pages (up to 150 pages with the current branch limits) that haven't been viewed/updated/commented in that time.

The "inactive pages" branch has the additional benefit that you can use the consolidated {{inactivePages}} smart value after the branch to put every page in a single email. For example, you can use {{inactivePages.url}} to include a list of all the page URLs in your email body. See the documentation for smart values to see more advanced formatting options https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/smart-values-in-jira-automation/

Spoiler alert, we're planning to add this consolidated smart value output to all of our branches soon!

If the "inactive pages" branch isn't what you want, we also have the "Lookup pages" action which has the same configuration options as the normal page branch. This outputs a {{lookupPages}} smart value which can also be used to send a single email with info from all of the pages.

[Hank Church]

thanks Trevor....who does the email go to?  I want it to go to the owner of all those pages you say i can add to the ONE email.  I was not able to add an email address...just select from a predefined list of "groups"

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Hank Church Automation rules can be used for this with success if you have a fairly low number of pages. But if you have just 50 expired pages, those will result in 50 separate emails. And after a while, rule execution will reach its limits (I think a branch can handle up to ~150 pages). But it works well if you are small.

If your numbers are larger, you may want to try the expiration dates (there is inheritance!), page owners (there is inheritance and multiple owners per content!) and notifications (a single , personalized notification with all the expired contents) provided by the Better Content Archiving app.

Setting the expiry date:

Email with the personalized list of pages and their statuses:

We built these features with much larger workloads in mind. (We have customers on Data Center with 10K+ users, 100K+ spaces and 1M+ pages!)

Free trial: https://midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/cloud/try

(Discl. it is a paid and supported app developed by our team. Free for 10 users!)

[Aaron Pavez _ServiceRocket_]

Hi @Hank Church 

You can do that with confluence automation. 

Automation is an admin feature available in Confluence Premium and Enterprise.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/what-is-confluence-automation/

> Setting up notifications (in both email and Slack)

This part is easy, you just need to add in the automation who to send the email to and connect slack.

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/use-slack-and-confluence-together/

> Confluence page owners that specific pages that they own are due for review.

For this, you need to set page status changed, user changed, page that hasn't changed, pages with certain label. Here think of how to look for those pages. 

Hope that helps!

[Hank Church]

so we are on the premium plan, so automation is available.  to be clear, i am Knowledge Manager here, and want to set up notifications to go out to page owners once their content reaches the "review date."  Now i'm guessing i have to set up that review date field somewhere?  How do i do that, and can that be done automatically for all new pages created regardless of the space theyre created in?  And once that field is set up, what is the process for setting up those notifications to go out to the page owners?  sdffds

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Thinking outside my comfort zone (aka I'm not familiar with all the features): 

Is there a way to generate a page with the person's "Review Required" pages (or everyone's pages by owner)? Page Properties Report? Some other macro?

Your automation could then be to generate the page(s) (on whatever cadence you want) and email the individual owners their page or all owners the combined page.

[Hank Church]

Thanks.  I was successful using automation to manually set up a rule the sends a recurring notice to a specific owner for each specific page he created between 6/10 and today.  He has about 10 of those, so he got 10 different emails.  

1) the link to the page was NOT included in the rule, so do i have to manually add that to the rule's condition set?

2) is there a way i can have just ONE email list ALL 10 pages due for review?  Wonder if i need to manually add that to the rule as well?  

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Reducing the number of emails to a link to 1 page with all your pages you need to review was the goal of my suggestion to generate a page with all the pages listed on it. I just don't know how you make that page, so I'm hoping someone else here can help out with that.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Hank Church 

1. How is the "review date" determined in your case? Is it based on creation date of the document? Or relative to the last edit date or some other date? Is it a fixed date or a period?

2. How many pages do you expect to report? It's important as Automation for Confluence doesn't handle page lists. If your page owner is responsible for 25 pages, they flooded by 25 emails, not one email with a list of pages. 

BTW this question has already been tackled here with a step-by-step simple way using a dedicated CLM solution as Automation for Confluence can be a bit complicated for content lifecycle management tasks like this (it's not dedicated for this domain.)

[RD Clare]

You can use Automation. You can set up this to trigger when labels are added or in this example it can be Manually triggered from the page.

[Hank Church]

so we are on the premium plan, so automation is available.  to be clear, i am Knowledge Manager here, and want to set up notifications to go out to page owners once their content reaches the "review date."  Now i'm guessing i have to set up that review date field somewhere?  How do i do that, and can that be done automatically for all new pages created regardless of the space theyre created in?  And once that field is set up, what is the process for setting up those notifications to go out to the page owners?

[RD Clare]

You could use the scheduled trigger combined with the for each page

This would check for Pages that were created more than a period of time ago(days weeks, months) and then could send a standard email. 

You'll also want to look at smart values.

I think the one you will need is {{page.owner.emailAddress}}

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

Comment removed - Posted separately

[Hank Church]

Thanks.  I was successful using automation to manually set up a rule the sends a recurring notice to a specific owner for each specific page he created between 6/10 and today.  He has about 10 of those, so he got 10 different emails.  

1) the link to the page was NOT included in the rule, so do i have to manually add that to the rule's condition set?

2) is there a way i can have just ONE email list ALL 10 pages due for review?  Wonder if i need to manually add that to the rule as well? 

[RD Clare]

For the first one you can use the smart values like so

For the Second one I don't think there is currently a way loop and store data to be sent in a single email. As far as I'm aware it will have to be one at a time for now. You could look into Atlassian Forge to create an in Confluence app that does what you're looking for but that will require some development.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Hank Church I'm not sure if you looked at the discussion here which contains a solution for a similar requirement. As noted, A4C can't handle page lists. Better Content Archiving is a dedicated tool for use cases like this and sends one email per recipient with a list of pages, including their link and even status information. (Automation for Confluence was not made for this, as that is a general tool.)

I see you are leaning to take the more complicated route, so I'm just curious if you are open to Confluence apps, dedicated to content lifecycle management. Have you looked into any of those? What do you think?

[Hank Church]

Yes...am looking at those now...Yours (Better Content Archiving), Page Approval for Confluence (Appfire) and Breeze - Confluence Document Management Workflows and Approval by B1NARY

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Hank Church Sounds good. Drop me a line at levente.szabo@midori-global.com if you would like a personal demo of Better Content Archiving or would discuss any questions regarding your use case.

[Hank Church]

Thanks...will do.  Am going to review those three apps with Atlassian rep tomorrow.