What are best practices for the Space Creation policy in large companies?

[Scott Selberg]

Hi,

I'm administrating an instance of Confluence in a a large company (>10,000 employees).  At present, the policy for creating a space is to send an email to one of the Confluence admins where it gets manually created.  In general, this is just a rubber stamp so I've thought about creating a self-service kiosk or creating a space.  Which to me begs the question why I wouldn't just give general users the permission to create a space in Confluence.

So I'm wondering - what policies/practices to other users follow?  Are there reasons to restrict space creation to a few admins?  Are there companies who use self-service kiosk models, such as with Bob Swift's CLI - and if so why use the Kiosk rather than allow users to create spaces directly?

[Maarten Cautreels]

Hi Scott,

I'm working at a company with 5800 employees (of which 1000+ already have a Confluence account).

We've recently (2-3 months ago) enabled the "Create Space" functionality for anyone and we haven't received any complaints just yet. We don't see a spectacular increase in space creation BUT it did make our users a lot happier because they don't need to contact us or service desk anymore if they are starting a new project (or team space).

I would allow users to create their own space and monitor new spaces being created and follow up from these statistics. If you see many more (duplicate/rubbish) spaces are being created you could take action and start looking into any addon.

Best,

Maarten