Reorganizing Confluence - Orphan Pages

[Jason Lansdowne]

My organization has been  using confluence for years and years. In that time we have amassed over 10,000 pages of content. Up until now we did not have a plan for how to organize these pages, and they currently reside in a few spaces that are shared by everyone. One of these spaces has over 7,000 documents. 

Recently we have started the painful process of reorganizing Confluence. We created a space for each team within our organization, and assigned a couple reviewers for each team. 

Some documents were created by employees that are still with the company and work on the same team. In these cases, its relatively easy to move these documents into the new spaces. 

However, there are thousands of orphan documents. These are documents that were written by someone that has left the company. They usually do not have any identification (i.e., a title or label) that would make them easy to identify ownership. Many of them are 5+ years old. I am struggling to come up with a way to deal with these documents. Do we just abandon them and the legacy spaces that they belong to? 

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

Hi @Jason Lansdowne 

Since you are on Confluence DC (looking at your tag), you can query database to fetch some useful information.

These links could help.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-view-a-list-of-all-space-creators-and-administrators-for-all-spaces-346325879.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-query-the-database-to-find-pages-using-a-specific-label-in-confluence-987144349.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-find-pages-with-most-historic-versions-in-confluence-936516579.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-obtain-a-list-of-all-pages-their-authors-and-related-information-from-the-confluence-database-968687591.html

Also refer to the schema: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-data-model-127369837.html

Confluence is honestly not great when it comes organising thousands of pages, its search capability is also not super helpful. If clean-up exercise and measures are not put in place then it does turn into a dumping ground.

I hope it helps.

Ravi

[Jason Lansdowne]

Thanks for the reply but I'm more of an end user than administrator, and I have no experience with any type of database queries so this is not helpful to me.