Transfer ownership for pages

[Schuuudi]

I have the following problem:
* an employee has left us (Team Lead).
* a replacement has now joined us and should continue to maintain the existing Confluence pages of the old employee.
Since there are many and distributed pages, I want to make it as easy as possible for the new employee to have an overview of the pages.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to search for the deactivated user, nor for his content contributions. Exchanging the ownership from the old to the new employee is also not possible. So what possibilities do I have, except to search the pages by hand in hours of work and to leave a special label for the new employee?

Does anyone have an idea? If possible we prefer a Confluence solution, without additional add ons.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

Hi @Schuuudi,

The Midori app was mentioned and recommended in the comments by @Norman Cates  and @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- (thanks!), but let me give a bit more details on our app.

The Midori app (called Better Content Archiving for Confluence, by the way) makes it super-easy to manage owners on all Confluence deployment types. It would make your life easier by:

1. Instead of representing the owner with labels, the app has a core concept of owners. It allows adding one or more owners to any page or blog. Owners can be inherited, so you can easily add an owner to a complete page tree.
2. The owner is independent from the original author, last modifier, contributors, etc. They can be the same and can be different, no restrictions. Therefore, if someone leaves your company, just change the owner of those pages he previously owned to a new owner. No big deal.
3. You can search for content without an owner, content with a specific owner, content owned by you, etc. using powerful CQL searches.
4. Because you are now working with labels and you can use CQL to search for content labeled with a certain label, you can freely combine labels with the app-managed content owners. You can even gradually convert from using labels to using app-managed content owners.

Plus, you can see the owner of the page in the top, notify them using powerful custom notifications, and generally make them a leader in the content collaboration activities.

In our mental model, the "owner" is the primary person who is responsible for the accuracy, validity and relevance of the information in the pages and blog posts owned by him/her. (There can be contents owned by multiple persons, that's fine.)

All in all, I strongly suggest that you try our app, because in addition to managing owners, it has been developed for 15 years to resolve the chaos and quality problems in Confluence spaces just exactly you described. And then it will continuously work in the background to prevent this happen again.

👉 Try it free here

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY]

Hello @Schuuudi

We provide a full-fledged content lifecycle management solution called Breeze, available via the Atlassian Marketplace.

It includes page and space ownership functionality and provides data export, so you can easily see the current ownership status of all Confluence pages.

Besides this, it also features

• automated content analyses,
• page review and archiving workflows,
• reports and notifications,
• bulk archiving and deletion,
• analytics,
• and more to update outdated pages quickly and enhance collaboration.

👉 Feel free to give it a try or schedule an appointment with me for a personal demo.

Cheers, Adrian from B1NARY (the developers of Breeze)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Confluence doesn't have the concept of a page "owner", beyond it being "anyone in the team who can create and edit content in this space".

That makes me have to ask for some clarification - what are you doing to represent "owner"?   Are you assuming "author" (the person who first created the page) is an "owner"?  Are you tagging people in the page properties?  Or something else?

[Schuuudi]

Hello @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- thank you very much for your question. To answer this question I need to elaborate a bit. In the past years, our company had Confluence for use, but never made sure that there were meaningful concepts, internal rules or any other guidelines or best practices for using Confluence. Those who used it at all did it kind of according to their own ability and measurement. As a result, after more than 10 years of use, we have an unmanageable jumble of information in the system that no one feels responsible for. I am now trying to get a grip on this situation, at least for our team. From surveys and experiences in our team I have learned that there should be at least one person at relevant Pages and also Spaces, who should regularly check the content on the pages for relevance and timeliness. This person then doesn't necessarily have to update the content himself, but also hand over this task. But currently this is the way we go for cleaning our knowledge and updating.
Currently I create labels to document the owner when it is no longer the author.

At the same time, I'm working on making the team comfortable with the new way of working, working together on page content and keeping it up to date. However, this is not working well yet. This changeover process is not yet complete. That's why I'm still sticking to the transition idea with the owner.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a good approach and has the advantage over most others that it makes it easier to do what you need.

Labels can be searched with CQL, and there are apps in the marketplace that can help you with merging or replacing if you don't want to code something yourself.

(The best thing to do would be have "ownership" in the meta-data, one that lists all the space-admins, but lets you add your own people to the list.  Plus of course, a way to search and display it.  But that's code that I suspect would need to be done by Atlassian - certainly was last time I wrote this up)

[Norman Cates]

Sorry to butt in here, but I was looking for ownership information as well. 

I note that we have a page status icon (a green check mark) and if I click on it, a popup comes up with a number of options. One of those options is Set Owner. 

Now, I note that this page status icon seems to be from a macro by Midori:

https://www.midori-global.com/products/better-content-archiving-for-confluence/

So perhaps the  Ownership of a page is coming entirely from the Midori macro.

I mention it in case it may be useful.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, there are a couple of apps that provide an ownership, including the Midori one.  I think your icons and ownership are coming from that app.  It's a good app, it works really well for this stuff, and a load more.

[Harald Seyr]

Hi @Schuuudi 

Just an idea: In case the old team lead has an account associated with a mail address in your company domain, you could take over his account (ask for IT to forward all emails to your adress so you can reset the password), then change the account so the email / login is the one of the replacement user.

This means you continue to use the old account, but with new email (and other info).

I expect that this allows the replacement to just continue where the old team lead has left.

Regards,

Harald

[Schuuudi]

Hi @Harald Seyr thanks for your idea. We will try that ;-)