A team lead publishes a new page in the team's Confluence space and then wonders whether anyone saw it. Confluence Cloud has several ways to tell people, but none of them is a single switch that says "notify this team about every new page". Here are the native options with their limits, and one app at the end.
Option 1: everyone watches the space
Watching a space covers all its pages and blog posts, so a watcher is told about new pages. Each person selects Watch on the space for themselves. Watching is per user account, so a group of 30 people is 30 separate watches.
The catch is how the notification arrives. Open your profile picture, then Settings, then Email:
- Daily Digest collects recent activity into one email a day. On a new account it includes new pages and live docs.
- Content I'm watching decides what is emailed in real time. On a new account only Comments, New blog posts and New whiteboards are on. New pages and live docs is off.
So by default a watcher hears about a new page the next day, in the digest. For real-time emails each person has to switch on New pages and live docs under Content I'm watching. It is a personal setting, so you can't set it for the team.
Option 2: @mention the team or the people in the page
Mentioning someone in a page notifies that person, and it works well for one announcement. The limits: it is manual, it depends on the author remembering, and the mentioned person must be able to see the page. It also does nothing for the next page.
Option 3: Automation for Confluence
Automation for Confluence can run a rule when a page is created in a space. As far as I could verify, the actions include sending an email and posting to Slack or Microsoft Teams, which covers "tell the team about new pages". Check two things in your own site before you rely on it: which recipients the email action accepts (a list of people, or a group), and that the Slack or Teams integration is connected for your site. I did not find an action that makes a group watch a space, so rules are for announcing, not for watching.
The upside is that the message goes out in real time and lands where the team already looks (a channel). The downside is that someone owns the rule and the recipient list, and people who join the team later are only included if the list follows the group.
Option 4: an admin adds the watches with the REST API
An admin can add a watch for another person with the REST API, one account at a time: POST /wiki/rest/api/user/watch/space/{spaceKey}?accountId={accountId}, with the header X-Atlassian-Token: no-check, as a Confluence Administrator or a Space Administrator of the space. A script can loop over a group's members. It is a snapshot, though: joiners are missed, leavers keep watching. I wrote the whole script and its limits in How to make a Confluence group watch a space, so I won't repeat it here.
Option 5: an app that keeps the group watching
Full disclosure: we build Group Watchers, so weigh this accordingly. Group Watchers: Auto-Watch Spaces & Pages for Confluence maps one or more groups to a space or a single page and keeps the members watching:
- It runs right after you change a rule and then every hour.
- Joiners start watching. For leavers it removes only the watches it added, and you can switch removal off.
- People who unwatch are not added back, and watches people already had are never touched.
- It runs on Atlassian's Forge platform and sends no data outside Atlassian.
What it does not do: it doesn't send its own notifications and doesn't change anyone's email settings. A watcher gets Confluence's normal notifications, based on their own settings. So the digest point from Option 1 still applies, and new pages arrive in real time only for people who switched on New pages and live docs.
Which one to pick
- One announcement: @mention, or post in the team channel.
- Real-time heads-up for every new page, in chat or email: an Automation rule on page created.
- Team members should get Confluence's own notifications, and the team changes often: keep the group watching, with a script you maintain or an app.
These also combine well: watching for the personal feed, and an Automation rule for the channel.
Confluence and Atlassian are trademarks of Atlassian. Kayabyte is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Atlassian.
Top comments (0)