📣 Verified Pages - Now Available in Confluence! ✅

[#1]

👋 Community! Avinoam from Confluence here and today I'm ridiculously excited to announce that Confluence now has Verified Pages!!! 

I’m guessing that you’ve also been in the situation where you’re looking at a page that hasn’t been updated in a while and you’re not confident that the content is still up to date or relevant. Today we’re finishing up our rollout of Verified Pages, which we’re hoping can alleviate some of these problems.

We leveraged the already existing content status functionality to implement content verification. We even put in a fancy check mark to really emphasize that this content status is a bit more special 😉

To make verified more valuable as a status, only page owners or space/site admins will be able to place and remove this status from any given content. 

But wait, there's more - Only certain users can verify a page, but how does this help with keeping content up to date? Glad you asked...

Automation for Confluence already has components for page statuses, and we setup an easy to use template that will look for inactive pages that are verified and automatically un-verify the page and email the page owner, asking them to review the page.

Verified in the page status drop down

Admin + page owner enforcement

Verified as part of the default set of content statuses for each space

New automation template that will look for inactive pages that are verified and automatically un-verify the page and email the page owner, asking them to review the page.

When it will be available?

This is actively rolling out to all Confluence customers!

We want to hear from you!

We’d love your feedback so please feel free to schedule time with us directly here or drop a comment on this post 

[Bri]

This is awesome, thank you!

[Adrian Hülsmann - B1NARY]

We are truly passionate about managing content and providing a solution for identifying outdated pages.

For that reason, we developed Breeze, a Confluence plugin that tremendously helps you review pages and establish workflows to keep your content quality high.

The feature set ranges from page approvals to review and archiving workflows, automated content reports, and analytics.

An interesting article on how Breeze improved the content quality of Confluence by 148 % can be found here.

So, if you want to go beyond the native Confluence content statuses, Breeze is worth a try and can be evaluated for free.

Kindest regards, Adrian from B1NARY (we are the developers of Breeze)

[Filip Callewaert]

Thx, @Avinoam and team! Improvements at lightning speed!!

[Filip Callewaert]

But I envy your flashy star-shaped blue checkbox icon, @Avinoam . Mine is only a shadow of it!

[Maik van Rossum]

Great feature! But how to manage the usage of it? Only on a per space basis?
And, how to restrict permissions for 'verified' to a 'space admin' role or group?

We using the Workflows add-on / app that also shows these kind of page statuses. 

Regards,
Maik

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

Adding one more status is an amazing development, but I see the maximum of 5 statuses remained. This can work for smaller teams, even if with some compromises.

For midsize or larger teams, it can't be fit into a document management workflow as that would require more than 5 statuses.

I'm also skeptical that limiting the use of a status arbitrarily instead of giving flexible options is a good idea. I can easily imagine where a reviewer of a document or a domain expert is not the owner of the particular page nor is a space admin.

If you are planning to implement content lifecycle management in Confluence, consider - on top of what I mentioned above - that Automation for Confluence sends an email per page. So if you are reporting 20/50/150 pages, your recipients will get flooded by that many emails.

The branch rule execution will cut off at 150 pages, so if you are reporting more pages, some users will not be notified. In that case, you need something more robust and dedicated to Confluence content lifecycle management with automation. These are the key limitations to consider but there are more.

For example, read the review by Ralph Jäger here about how they ran into the limitations of A4C and how they implemented an automated and dedicated content lifecycle management system with Better Content Archiving for Confluence instead.

Sidenote: development doesn't stop for BCA at statuses! It now brings Confluence Premium-quality analytics to all tiers (including free) with page status reports, content usage insights on space and site levels, and user activity reports. Learn more here and give it a try:

(Please note that I'm part of the team developing Better Content Archiving for Confluence.)

[Avinoam]

@Filip Callewaert if you're still having technical issues, please head to https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/ and select "technical support" to submit a request.

Once you submit the request, we'll be on the lookout for it. Thanks!

[Maik van Rossum]

@Avinoam do you probably have an answer to my questions, too? 

As far as I know it's only possible on a per space basis, therefor I had to adjust labels and settings for every space. 

Furthermore, as every creator of a page becomes the 'owner' basically everyone who can add content (within a given space) is able to add the 'VERIFIED' status, correct?

"[...] only page owners or space/site admins will be able to place and remove this status from any given content".

Regards,
Maik

[Avinoam]

@Maik van Rossum Verified status has been added as part of the default set of content statuses in each space.

Correct, anyone who is a page owner or admin can add or remove verified to a page. Only space admins an up can change the space content statuses though in space settings.

Hope this helps!

[Maik van Rossum]

Thanks for explaining. I don't see this is as a very useful implementation... 

1) Settings should be made generally manageable, also for newly created spaces.

2) The 'badge' makes it look like the page is 'authorised', which isn't always the case as every page creator can add it.

As mentioned before, we use Workflows for Confluence, and that's for a good reason. So these kind of 'improvements' may interfere with decisions made on the customer's side. 

So yes, I think it can see the benefits for some companies or users, but in our case the implementation and upfront communication could have be done a bit more controlled and manageable. 

Regards,
Maik

[Ralph Jäger]

Thiniking about a workflow for pages is a great idea and helps the intranet being up to date and usefull.

Unfortunately we cannot use this concept because of limitations in Automation for Confluence. It could work for a smaller page count (<100), but for larger instances the automation will only find part of inactive pages.

Furthermore our employees have been complaining about receiving about 100 emails about pages beeing inactive and started to ignore emails sent by confluence....

[Bri]

@Avinoam  - Will these statuses become available to us in search and/or represented in the space content manager? 

We want to be able to see a list of which pages have this verified (or any) status assigned. 

[Avinoam]

@Bri absolutely yes!! now that we've introduced Verified Status you'll start to see it appear on multiple surfaces across Confluence, including Search, Content Manager, Automation, and so much more... 

[Haddon Fisher]

This is a concept I've been grappling with in Confluence for more than 10 years, so very happy that we can do this using not-labels. After looking at it though, the main gain here is a more "in your face" label...the ceiling on actual usefulness is pretty low.

In my experience doing this type of labeling and evaluating of stale pages manually is extremely time-consuming; you are either doing the work yourself, or managing\cajoling\herding the cats you've delegated this to.

On the other hand, A4C is not a production-ready feature. Abstractly, the entire thing is rough edges and duct tape, but as people have pointed out already, the oddly low limit on the number of pages a rule can touch pretty much entirely breaks this use-case. 

It feels like more time should be invested into A4C before more functionality that relies on it is a focus.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Haddon Fisher I think many people agree with you there including myself. I also wanted to add that the problem is not only that A4C is not production-ready for large teams - the problem is that Atlassian demands a premium for it.

Just think about this: A4C is available for Premium and Enterprise, the tier level where workload, user counts, and volume of pages and spaces are the highest. Yet, A4C's limitations hit this cohort the hardest. @Avinoam and his team keep churning out features but the teams those would be valuable for are smaller teams - the ones who can't have A4C.

The other major problem is that Atlassian gave up on building real partnerships with Marketplace vendors and the Automation team (post-acquisition) is a prime example. Just look at how they abandoned the possibility of extending Automation for Jira Cloud with third-party actions.

I know this is a Marketplace Partner perspective, which is not always welcome, but I hope you as Atlassian customers can understand or empathize because there are real, reliable end-to-end solutions already potentially at a lower cost than the premium you pay for A4C. Yet Atlassian claims they solved everything when it's mostly "rough edges and duct tape" as you said very aptly.

It would be beneficial sometimes for customers to embrace Marketplace apps more instead of upgrading their Atlassian tier as those could be better and more economical solutions.

As you suggest, Atlassian should invest more time and effort in areas where they really can provide value, not replace established solutions with native but patchwork features.

[Manuel]

Just for Cloud - anoying.

[Damian Scattergood]

Just what I needed. We will implement this today! Excellent

[Sylvain Ménard]

Nice feature, but can you tell us where or how we can do to view a status filtered list of pages within a space. By themselves, pages status tags are not that useful. Maybe I missed something, I don't know. I'm eager to hear from you. Thanks.

[Avinoam]

@Sylvain Ménard this is coming soon and will be available as a filter and bulk action within the Content Manager, so stay tuned!

[Craig Calef]

Where is the "page status dropdown?"  I don't see it anywhere, on pages I own.