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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. You can restore the space from the last backup, or restore the pages themselves, of course.)

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. 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.

Disable the SMTP server in your test Confluence, so that you will not flood your users' mailboxes with unexpected notification emails during your experiments.

Manage

Use global configurations all the time

Maintaining consistent archiving settings for a large number of spaces will be a nightmare without global configurations. With them, it will be super easy.

Set up a default configuration if your team creates spaces all the time

Applying configuration for new spaces can be tedious. Create a "generally useful" global configuration and set that as default configuration.

Use space labels to categorize your spaces

Group your spaces to "product", "client", "r&d", etc. categories.

Once, it will give you a nicely structured Content Quality Statistics report. The other benefit is that very likely your categories can 1:1 mapped to global configurations. Meaning, there would be a global configuration called "Product" which should be applied to all spaces labeled with "product", and so on.

Structure is your friend, especially if your Confluence site is large.

Set up a trusted group if you have lots of space administrators

If you have lots of space administrator, you probably don't want to permit everyone to re-configure or execute archiving. To restrict those who are permitted, use a trusted group.

Set up a separate user for archiving purposes called "Automatic Wiki Archiver" or similar

If you used an actual user account for archiving purposes (selecting it at configuration time), people would think that it was actually him who cleaned up the unnecessary pages, not the scheduled job.

To avoid confusion, create a separate, intuitively named user account (with Confluence administration permissions) and use that only for this.

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