Setting "Owned By" to a Group?

[Victoria Philips]

I would love to be able to set the "Owned By" feature at the top of Confluence Cloud pages to a group, instead of an individual. Our teams change a lot and it may also not be a single person on the team that owns the content. Is there any way to choose a group instead?

[Michel Neeser]

Hi @Victoria Philips and welcome!

Just to add to the comment of @Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM: A central concept of Jira and Confluence in general is to always have an individual being responsible for a single piece of information, as nobody is really responsible if something belongs to a group. That's why you can't assign "Owned by" to a group.

If by "Our teams change a lot" you mean that users are deactivated on the instance, you can use the new Content Manager to find the pages without an active owner. Since you're on Premium, this feature is available to you, and you can find more information here.

Hope this helps!

[Victoria Philips]

Hi Michel,
Thank you for your answer :).

We don't necessarily have people leave that often. Our Development teams just swap members a lot and they often move to other projects. However, their knowledge and responsibilities are transferred to their replacements. Groups can help a lot with automating department and team changes.

We use ownership for many different things, depending on the content. For policy, we do want a sole owner. However, we think guides and resources can be owned and upkept by a community.

Documentation is a secondary function to running our business. If we assign ownership to one person, they have too much responsibility. When instead, someone could reach out to a team and get support from one of several content experts.

There are times when I prefer individual ownership for certain content, but it would be nice to have both options, so that individual ownership could still be applied, but group ownership could be too.

[Kristian Klima]

@Victoria Philips 

You can... create a technical 'collective user'.

Say you have an IT team that needs to share ownership of their content. They probably have a corporate email like it@company.com.

So you can create a user in Confluence (with its own seat of course) using that email. You can then assign the ownership over the documents to that collective entity while the individual users would only contribute to the content.

Hope this helps :) 

[Victoria Philips]

Hi Kristian!

That is an intriguing idea. I'm going to explore this and see if it can help :).

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

As @Michel Neeser wrote having multiple owners means that there is no real owner in practice, therefore it is discouraged. It is the same exact problem why a Jira issue can have only a single assignee.

Having said that, I see people regularly asking for multi-assignee implementations so there is a definite need for that. In Jira, you can use a "Multiple users" type custom field to implement it (although with some limitations).

In Confluence, the Better Content Archiving app implements page owners with the following advantages compared to the built-in owners:

• You can have multiple owners per page!
• You can have owners that own a whole tree of pages, we call these "content tree owners" (in other words, the owner is inherited by descendant pages!)
• You can have owners for blogs, too

It looks simply like this (note that both selectors allow multiple users and they can even be combined):

As you can have multiple users, it can help with your use case, too. 

Give it a try!

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

[Victoria Philips]

Hi Aron!

Thank you for the information about this app! That might be just what we need. I'll investigate this further with my team to see if it will meet our needs.

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

Spaces and Pages can't be owned by a Group, only by an user.