Confluence Spaces Re-Organization and Management

[michael.dopps@bit-wizards.com]

We are new to Confluence and over the last months/year or so we have begun creating spaces related to our specific clients as needed for coordination and documentation, we are now at a point in which we have too many of Random sites to sort through and searching pulls up every reference to a client or team member and it's becoming very hard to figure out where to find specific types of information under all spaces, some items are root level and others neatly organized in various different manners.  What we are considering is to create a standard process with sub spaces such as Opportunities, Projects, Internal Team and then under those create pages for each Client (such as company name, or team member) and then under those create and keep track of individual projects, blogs  and meeting notes.  

Presently we have hundreds of site pages and are looking for a way to move some of those under these sub categories.  Is there a way to do this without having to create new and try to copy paste all of the detail we already have recorded in these various pages?  Also being able to link to a PAGE in a project instead of ONLY to a Space from within JIRA

From there we plan to limit who can create site pages for a client at the top...  Thoughts on this?

The Main issue here is once you have created something in the wrong place, such as in the root it will not let you "Move them" 
You get an error:  "You cannot move this page to another space"

Same Historical issue with file systems, if you start out with zero organization from the beginning the product gets ruined and becomes useless.. 

[Victor Mutambuki]

Michael,

You can control who can create spaces. For example, you can deny the Confluence-User group the global permission to create spaces.  Also, you need to be a Confluence System Admin to perform this functions.

Go to General Configuration --> Global Permissions --> Edit Permissions. Deny whichever group, the Create Space Permission.

Also, moving pages to another space requires certain permission. See info below plus documentation.

Notes about permissions

To move a page, you need the following permissions:

• 'Add' permission on the page you're moving, and
• 'View' permission on the page's parent page. If you're moving the page to a different parent, you need 'View' permission on the new parent.

To move a page into a different space, you also need:

• 'Delete' permission on the space you're moving from, and
• 'Add' permission on the space you're moving to.

victor

[michael.dopps@bit-wizards.com]

Hey Victor, Thank you for the reply. You are spot on with those steps, and I have created new rules and permissions on who can create Spaces with those restrictions. 

The main issue still exists being able to move/convert a Space to a Page. For example the name Default.htm should never be a Space (not sure how or who created it) but I had to figure out the content inside of it and find a place to create a Page put the detail under its related Space, or another good example is the actual name of a Project isnt helpful being a space either, even if you have really good naming conventions you would end up with thousands of items as spaces, since we go through that many projects each year, each with their own list of Sprints. 

I would think this could happen to most organizations very quickly with too many things called Spaces as un-categorized items which really should be pages under a specific topic. 

[Victor Mutambuki]

Michael,

I don't think you can convert a space into a page. You can however make a page into the main page of a space.

Victor

[michael.dopps@bit-wizards.com]

You are correct it does not work. Someone has Set the expectation that a Space can be Converted or Moved to a different Hierarchy. 

Easy steps to create, open a Space and at the top right click the drop down and click move, you get a wizard popup which will never work, and if you click the browse button to select a place to move it to you see the error.

"The following error(s) occurred:

• You cannot move a page to be underneath itself or its children.

[Henning van Ackeren]

Hi Michael,

the dropdown at the top right is always operating on the current >page<, in this case the space's home >page<. So, what you tried to do is exactly what the error message says!

The space's home page is always created when creating the space and has the same page name as the space, just with "Home" added. I guess, that's why you assumed the top right menu is operating on the space, but it isn't.

All operations on the   >space<   - the container for pages - are made through the Space Tools menu at the lower right. There you can do what Victor suggested above.

[michael.dopps@bit-wizards.com]

Hi Henning,

Thank you for chiming in.

We use the Web hosted version, and do not have any space tools or any menus on the lower right. Top left we have space settings, but I do not see any migration methods to take pages or space configurations inside a space to move them or copy everything inside a space to another space.  I can go edit a page and move individual pages to another space, but very quickly on any given topic (space), content starts to accumulate via many pages and information no one wants to lose and in our case there's alot of individual pages and sub, sub, sub pages under various spaces.

To be honest that's really what's needed here since the Space seems to be a container.  I don't think we can assume people will understand that a container is needed since basic html structure has already trained us to an typical expected flat structure. 

I have read through hundreds of posts of admins and users asking to move a space to a different page, which obviously denotes the lack of understanding of the underlying structure you are referring to, which I assume was created for the specific engineered architecture to function. 

Now Realizing this kind of reaction and seeing these posts dating back to 2015, should yield a simple solution from the development team, if its out there I have been unable to find it, other than backup and restore via XML into a different space not available to most, and complicated at best.

We need a move or copy tool for space content to another space, otherwise many of us will have no hope or prayer to maintain an efficient structure long term via collecting content users can easily find. They will either give up trying to find something or create another page elsewhere and duplicate the content.

[Henning van Ackeren]

Sorry, I don't know the web hosted version at all, so I can't help, I'm afraid!

I can only say that what you want to achieve is possible in server based Confluence.

I hope you'll find a good solution!

[michael.dopps@bit-wizards.com]

Hi Henning,

One other thought about your previous suggestion.  If you open a space your saying that you get the first Page inside the Space, and the edit will simply edit the First "Page". 

If that is the case why, when you choose move or copy from the edit menu, are you not given the opportunity to change the Space or select a new Space or even a new Parent? Attempting to type in a new Parent or go to browse gives the error stating that function is not available. 

I can move Pages into other spaces, have already done tons of those to new organized spaces.

[Henning van Ackeren]

Could be that you're not allowed to move the "highest" page in the page hierarchy incl. its descendants because a space must contain at least one page. But I'm just guessing here. And that does not explain why you can't copy it into another space.

In server based Confluence, I'd create a new page, make it the home page of the space, and reorder the pages so that the new page is the highest one i.e. the parent of all others. Then I can move the original home page to another space.

Again, I don't know if all of this work different in cloud based Confluence!