Restricting Confluence pages during their approval process

[#1]

For a long time now, users have been looking for a way to restrict the visibility of their Confluence pages while they’re waiting to be approved. This is a useful feature as it means unapproved and incomplete work will not be visible to users and potential clients prior to completion. It’s a broad use case and is highly sought after and valuable to businesses.

This article will show you how this is now possible, and how to do it with the Workflows for Confluence app available on Cloud. 

Designing your Workflow

The workflow thats being designed has the following requirements:

1. Initially restrict the page so only the creator has the ability to view it while it’s in a Draft status

2. Send the page off to the Approval team to be approved/rejected

3. Once approved remove all restrictions so all users have visibility

4. If rejected then leave restricted and allow page creator to edit and send it off for approval again.

Each node in the workflow has its own custom configuration which the designer can set. The configuration includes the ability to:

• Give Users/Groups permissions to View/Edit pages

• Determine what happens to the page’s workflow status once edited or expired

• Limit which Users/Groups can transition from each status using Conditions

• Set which Users/Groups are required to Approve the page.

Applying your Workflow

Once the workflow has been designed and saved, you are now ready to start applying it to your Confluence pages!

You can assign a default workflow to your Confluence Instance/Specific Space or use custom CQL filters to map to Workflows which will automatically applied when a page is created. Or if you want to try it out on a single page you can select one from a list of enabled workflows to be applied to the page.

Using the Workflow

Now the workflow is applied to your page, we can begin using it. The byline displays the current status of the workflow, an on clicking the byline the user can begin stepping through the workflow.

As configured earlier the page is initially in the In Progress status. Upon transitioning to Approval, the approvers are all notified via email that they’re required. Once they reach the page they can approve/reject the status and optionally give a comment explaining why they made their choice.

Once the page has been approved, you can see that the page is no longer restricted to anyone.

Hopefully this article has shown you how Workflows can be used to automate and improve you business processes!

If you’re looking for more potential use cases take a look at the workflows that are included with the app, take a look here.