How to require approval on a Confluence page

Confluence has no built-in approval. Teams work around it with a status macro, a comment saying “approved”, or a table of names — all of which keep saying “approved” long after the page has changed underneath them. This page covers the options and what a workable approval needs.

The workarounds, and where each breaks

A status macro. Someone sets it to APPROVED by hand. Nothing stops the next editor from changing the page and leaving the macro untouched, so the badge slowly becomes a lie.

A comment. “Approved by Ana, 12 March.” Fine as a record, invisible as a state: you cannot list every page that is still waiting, and nobody is asked to look again next year.

Jira issue per page. Real workflow, real approvals, wrong place. The approval lives in a ticket while the content lives in Confluence, and the two drift.

What an approval has to survive

  1. An edit. If the page changes after approval, the approval no longer describes it. The honest behaviour is to reopen the review and say so on the page.
  2. Time. Many quality systems require documents to be re-approved on a cycle — annually is typical. That is a schedule, not something a reviewer remembers.
  3. Being found. “Which pages are waiting on me?” and “what is approved right now?” have to be answerable without opening every page.

Doing it with Signdesk

Signdesk puts the approval next to the page byline:

  1. Request approval and pick the reviewers. Choose whether everyone listed must approve or any one of them is enough.
  2. Each reviewer approves or requests changes, with an optional comment. One rejection settles it immediately rather than leaving the page half-approved.
  3. Edit the page and the approval drops back to in review, decisions cleared — the panel says “approved at v4, the page is now at v7”.
  4. Set a review-by period per space; a daily sweep marks approvals expired when it passes.
  5. The state is written to a Confluence label, so label = "approval-expired" finds everything that needs a fresh look, and Confluence automation can act on it.

No external service is involved: Signdesk is an Atlassian Forge app with no egress, so approval records stay inside your site.

Pairing approval with acknowledgement

Approval is the few; acknowledgement is the many. Once a policy is approved, the next question is whether everyone has read it — that is Ackdesk, which uses the same version-aware logic for the whole company.

Signdesk for Confluence · DataForte AB · hello@dataforteab.com