At Atlassian, we know work can’t stop for maintenance windows. For many organizations, it can be difficult for admins to find time for planned maintenance. After all, downtime on mission-critical applications can affect productivity and team output.
To minimize planned downtime in Jira Software and Jira Service Desk Data Center, we introduced zero downtime upgrades – admins can shut down and upgrade their instance one node at a time while users can continue working without interruption. Now, we’re minimizing planned downtime in Confluence Data Center by introducing read-only mode, a top-voted feature request.
Wait, what’s Confluence Data Center?
Confluence Data Center is a self-hosted solution provides consistent performance at scale, uninterrupted access and administrative control, making it easier for enterprise teams to collaborate. Learn more here.
Get your nights and weekends back
Turning on read-only mode keeps users working and allows them to continue to consume content while admins (like you!) perform a range of maintenance related activities.
You can use read-only mode when you’re upgrading Confluence or upgrading part of your Confluence infrastructure. It’s also great for site migrations, consolidating several Confluence instances or unexpected situations where you might want to put the brakes on content creation while you determine if you need to restore a site backup.
Say goodbye to late night and weekend maintenance windows. With read-only mode, you’ll have greater flexibility to schedule downtime, and you can avoid maintenance-related downtime without affecting user productivity.
Understanding how read-only mode works
When Confluence Data Center is in read-only mode, users will be able to view, search and navigate pages, blogs, and attachments, but they won’t be able to edit them. (See the release notes for the list of limited actions and for tips and important considerations before using read-only mode.)
Administration actions, such as managing apps or changing site configuration, are not restricted in read-only mode. This means you can turn read-only mode on before upgrading your Confluence Data Center instance, consolidating multiple instances, migrating to a new platform, or performing other maintenance work, while ensuring that users still have access to their Confluence content.
As an admin, you’ll be able to turn read-only mode on and off via the Maintenance page in the admin console. On this page, we also indicate which user-installed apps have been marked as compatible with read-only mode. If an app is not compatible with read-only mode, you may want to temporarily disable it to prevent users from creating or modifying content.
The Maintenance page also offers a banner message that can be used with read-only mode or for important updates, like an upcoming use of read-only mode. The banner message is customizable and will display on all of your Confluence pages. We’ve provided a default message that can be used to notify users that they will not be able to create or modify content, or you can customize the message to your team’s needs.
Upgrade to Confluence Data Center 6.10
Read-only mode is available in Confluence Data Center 6.10 and above, and you can read more about what’s new in the release notes before upgrading.
If your team is using Confluence Server, learn best practices for pitching Data Center to your team (or your boss) and make the case for Confluence Data Center with this presentation template: