How do I migrate page / space ownership from one user to another in confluence?

Hamish Tedeschi April 30, 2015

I have a user who created the bulk of the pages in our wiki and has now left. I want to migrate ownership to a current user, so the pages display as being owned by someone who actually exists in the org!

1 answer

2 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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April 30, 2015

I think there's two things here, an implied process question and a stated technical one.

The process one first.  

I think you're conflating "owner" with "author".  They are not the same thing.  I write documentation in people's wikis and then leave.  I'm the author, but it's their wiki, their data, and I hope my writings are useful to them - they still own what I've written.  More importantly, in the future, they will probably want to know who wrote it, so you don't want to change the author. 

Confluence does not have a direct single "owner" field for a page either, because it's not that useful a concept in a wiki where you're actively asking people to contribute lots of stuff.  As a general rule, I'd forget a direct "owner" and just say "it's anyone with admin rights to the space, other than system admins".  Or implement something to nominate a particular person per space or page.

To change "owner", change the permissions of the page so that the people who "own" it have the right permissions on it, or flag them somehow.  If you conflate owner with author, you just cause problems in the structure - if you changed the author to me, and the page was wrong, I'd be being blamed for someone else's bad docs and that's also very very wrong.  I can own it, but the authorship is important.  

Finally, what happens when 120 people edit a page?  Which one of them is now the owner?  Do I own it just because I noticed and corrected a spelling mistake?  Do I own it because I created a space and hence the home page, which is maintained and owned by the users who are writing in the space?

In other words, I wouldn't do this.  Changing the author is wrong.

On the technical side:

You'd need to hack the database because there's no function to do this change in Confluence for the reasons above.  You can't do that on Cloud.

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