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Manage the Confluence content lifecycle

The Better Content Archiving app helps you develop a sense of responsibility over Confluence content, especially over the content you create or are the owner of. This responsibility includes being aware of the precise status of every piece of content along its lifecycle.

What is a content status?

A content status represents a page's or blog post's current position in its lifecycle. Typical examples include "Up-to-date", "Expired" and "To archive", though the exact set depends on your workflow.

A content can change from one status to another in two ways:

  1. Automatically:
    Triggered by a rule running in the background. For example, if a page is not updated for a set number of days, it moves from "Up-to-date" to "Expired".
  2. Manually:
    Triggered by an explicit user interaction. For example, if after a review you use the Confirm quick action to express that a page is still valid and relevant, it moves from "Expired" to "Up-to-date".

A Confluence content lifecycle workflow example

Consider a space that hosts your team's HR policy documentation. The following typical workflow applies to any page in that space, for example, an "Onboarding Guide" page that hasn't been touched in a while:

  1. After 365 days without an edit, the page automatically moves to "Expired" status.
  2. As the page's owner, you receive an email notification listing your expired pages, including the "Onboarding Guide", calling you to review it.
  3. You open the page, notice a few steps are outdated, and edit it to fix them, which moves it back to "Up-to-date" status. If the changes need sign-off first, you could set the status to "Waiting for approval" instead.
  4. The "Onboarding Guide" is "Up-to-date" again, ready for the next new hire. Or, if you sent it for approval, your reviewer receives an email about the page waiting for them, and it continues on its lifecycle journey.

Work with the content status

The app gives you complementary ways to work with the content status:

  • Track content status across a whole space or site: dashboards and reports show you the status distribution and let you drill down to individual pieces of content, so you can gauge and improve the health of your content at any scale.
  • View content status of an individual page or blog post via the Content Status Indicator, shown right under its title, with an expanded view that reveals owners, dates, and other details.
  • Use quick actions to manually move a page along its lifecycle, for example by setting an owner or an expiration date, directly from the Content Status Indicator.

Content status powered features

It is important to realize that statuses are not just for display purposes! They also power and integrate with the following features:

  • Search lets you find pages and blog posts by their current status. You can also search using more complex queries that combine multiple fields. For example, you can search for the pages in the "Data Retention Policy" and the "Security Policy" spaces which are in the "Expired" status ordered by their title.
  • Macros (many of them) accept content status as macro parameter. For example, you can list the pages that will soon be archived in the home page of the encompassing space.
  • Reports help you analyze the status of your spaces, pages and blog posts. For example, you can gain insights into how the content quality improves over time in the spaces that contain customer-facing documentation.
  • Notifications enable sending periodic emails that contain content lists to Confluence users and even groups! For example, you can send reminder emails with the contents to review to the responsible parties in an approval workflow.
  • Automate actions on Confluence content depending on their status. For example, if a content has not been updated for 365 days and has not been viewed for 500 days, move it to the "To archive" status. Then, let the periodic job archive these every Monday 04:00AM before your team members start their workday.

Configure content status

The concept of the content statuses is designed both for flexibility (to serve all sorts of workflows) and for manage-ability (to maintain a consistent set of statuses even in the largest Confluence sites). You can configure them individually, then group them to reusable schemes and finally apply the schemes to multiple spaces that share the same workflow. The available statuses are defined by your Confluence content lifecycle management strategy.

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