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Overview

This page describes efficient techniques to implement content lifecycle management strategies with Confluence.

Learn

Make sure to read this awesome article

The Master Guide to Confluence content lifecycle management is a highly recommended article!

It explains about the problem of content expiration in Confluence, and gives tips how to use Better Content Archiving effectively to solve that problem.

Roll-out

Introduce the app gradually to your organization

Do not introduce the app in a single huge step, as that would overwhelm your users. If you activated the app for all your spaces in one go, your users would receive a report with several hundred expired pages, and no-one would care.

Instead, activate it on a couple of new spaces every week, leaving enough time for your users to review and update their pages. Do it until it is active on all spaces.

Use the "automatic age-based page archiving" feature carefully

If you mis-configured it and would accidentally archive hundreds of pages, it will be painful to restore the original state in the fresh space. (It is doable in multiple ways, yet painful.)

A better approach would be defining a relatively long expiration interval, then gradually decreasing it and closely watch what parts of the content would expire at that setting. Using this "divide and conquer" technique will help you to understand "how old are the things". While fine-tuning it, update the pages that should be updated, then activate the archiving feature only when you truly understood the state of your content.

Also, see the next item.

Experiment with your production content in a Confluence test instance

Set up a test Confluence Cloud instance (either by starting a new trial or by creating a sandbox). Having this, make a backup of your production content (some spaces or all) and restore it in the test instance.

Then, experiment with age-based archiving without the risk of "accidentally" archiving your production content. Using "what if" scenarios is a really great way to find the best settings for your spaces.

If you invite real users (your team members) into the test instance, make sure you let them know beforehand. They may receive unexpected notification emails from your test instance during your experiments.

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