Is it possible to remove a draft status page without removing the approved workflow for the page?

[Brian Acon]

For example, if a draft page (behind an approved page) has not been advanced in some time, can the draft be removed without removing the entire workflow, and in the process losing the approved status on the original page?

Thanks

[James Conway]

Hi @davin 

There is currently no 'Cancel Draft' or 'Delete Draft' capability in Comala Document Management. There are two approaches you can take:

• Go to Page History in the ... (page actions) menu and restore the approved version. To identify the approved version, you can use Page Activity (also in ... page actions menu) and look for the most recent approved state and read across to the Confluence Page version
  • 
• If this is a common occurrence, you could consider using Comala Publishing to establish separate 'Draft' and 'Published' spaces, you can refer to our documentation on Different space publishing for more details. You can get a free trial of Comala Publishing from the Atlassian Marketplace. If you need any help setting it up for your specific use case, please contact our Customer Success team at https://support.comalatech.com 

Kind regards

James
Senior Product Manager

[davin]

Hi James, 

Thanks for providing the tip to identify the last published version.

Just tried it out but seems like even after manually reverting back to the last published version, the current state doesn't change to the state of the reverted version (Published state). It just stays the same as it was before reverting.

Now, I know I can manually "admin override" it but that would trigger all the actions in the workflow for state-change to Published (Eg: send-email macro to watchers once page has transitioned to Published). Obviously I do not want to do that because I am not really making any new changes, rather doing the opposite and reverting to the last published state.

How do I work around this? A simple cancel draft functionality seems very rudimentary in this case rather than going through so many complications.

[James Conway]

Hi @davin,

We currently do not have plans to introduce the ability to delete draft page versions in Comala Document Management. If you do not want to generate notifications of a new approved version I suggest that you do not approve the page until it has notifiable changes.

The link to the approved version will remain active and assuming you are using same-space publishing, page viewers will be automatically directed to the approved version of the page.

If you wish to discuss this scenario further, please do open a ticket with us at https://support.comalatech.com

All the best

James
Senior Product Manager

[Mike Rink]

Hey Brian,

Is your team using Comala Workflows and Comala Publishing together? Not just Workflows on its own? Let me know and hopefully I can help :) 

[Brian Acon]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your reply.  We use Comala workflows as a plug-in with Confluence.  I'm working in document control and I'm just looking for a way to clean up Draft pages that were started but never followed up on.

Best regards,

Brian

[Anatol Straub]

Hi Brian

I don't really see what is bothering you about old drafts tbh. For me thats the point of final versions; that drafts can't be seen by common users and don't need to be up to date until review and approval. But of course I don't know your exact use case.

Anyway if you don't mind cleaning manually you could just revert the page to the last published version. That way you can either leave the draft to be a copy of the approved page or approve it again to "remove" the draft completely. The latter leads to an additional published version though.

Possibly there's a more satisfying solution using Publishing or maybe Scroll Versions.

[Mike Rink]

Thanks @Brian Acon. When it comes to Draft vs. Approved versions, Workflows doesn't actually keep two versions of the content. What the app does is control which version of the page users can see - either the earlier approved version, or the current draft page. Since it's the same content, and Workflows is simply controlling the version that users see, if you delete that page it will remove the content entirely, and no versions of the page will be available for users to access. 

It seems like in your case you'll have to keep the draft versions around, in order to preserve access to their approved versions. I haven't tried this, but an admin could try to revert those pages to the last Confluence version that was the "approved" version.  

[Brian Acon]

Thanks Mike, this is exactly the explanation I was looking for.

Best regards

[Mike Rink]

Great! Glad I was able to help, and thanks for being a customer! 

[davin]

Hey @Mike Rink 

I'm currently facing a similar problem. 

In my case, sometimes users might make some changes that are not approved by reviewers and so do not get published but remain as drafts.

So, is there any "Cancel Draft" or "Delete Draft" feature where if a reviewer decides, they can simply remove this draft all together from the page and only keep the published version? This is needed as I have set-restrictions added to the workflow once a page is being edited and get removed only when it is published. So if a draft is discarded and not to be published, how do I reset the restrictions?

You mentioned that an admin can revert the pages to the last "Published" version. Do you mean by going through the Page History and manually restoring the page to the version that was last published? If so, how do I know which was the last published version as there can be a lot of changes in the drafts creating a lot of versions after the last published version and I don't see any clear identifier that calls out which is the published version. 

Is there no direct functionality within Comala that automatically restores the last published version when given a command? That would be mighty helpful!