How can a Space Administrator gain access to restricted pages in the space she's an admin of?

[Matthew Warren]

Scenario

A new hire needs access to all of the content/pages within her team's Space, much of which has been restricted to a handful of individual users (not groups) by past employees.

This user has been granted admin access to the Space.

How can this user easily gain access to these restricted pages without another user with access granting them access or making them a global admin?

This article (written for Cloud) contains a method for recovering access to restricted pages but does not seem to work for Data Center.

[Bill Bailey]

@Matthew Warren , I would suggest making that user a space admin, then they should be able to change the permission on the pages. And I think that will give them access to the Restricted Pages tab under Space Tools -> Permissions. Once they have access, they can easily remove restrictions.

If that is enough to give them access, an admin, can access that same page, remove all restrictions, and then let the new space admin correctly set permissions using groups, to try to future-proof the permissions.

[Matthew Warren]

Hi @Bill Bailey , Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, this solution does not fully solve the issue I'm having.

The user already has admin access to the Space (green checks across the board). However when they click on an unlock icon on the list of restricted pages in the Space, instead of being shown Page Information, where one would remove restrictions, they are shown the 'You don't have permission to view this page' message. This applies to most, but not all restricted pages. Some pages allow this user to manage restrictions, but most do not.

Is there another aspect of this that I'm missing?

[Bill Bailey]

What about from the Restricted Pages tab under Space tools? Are they able to manipulate there?

Maybe you need to temporarily grant her admin rights to clean this up, or another admin will have to do it for her.

[Matthew Warren]

What about from the Restricted Pages tab under Space tools? Are they able to manipulate there?

No, they can see the all of the restricted pages in the Space on that tab of the same name, but cannot manipulate the restrictions in any way. All clicks from that tab/page lead them to a 'You don't have permission to view this page' message.

I clearly do not understand what the term 'admin' means when it comes to Spaces in Confluence. 

[Bill Bailey]

Well then you will need to either a) do the work for them (or at least add them to the permissions), or b) make them temporarily a member of the group with Confluence Administrator permissions (under Global Permissions in the admin console).