Hundreds of Confluence pages, multiple approval workflows and one question: what’s happening with our documents?
When you’re managing reviews and approvals across different teams and spaces, finding the information you need isn’t always straightforward.
Which documents are waiting for approval? What’s been sitting in review for too long? Are important policies approaching their expiry dates? And when an auditor asks for evidence, how easily can you pull it together?
We’ve rebuilt Workflows Search in Workflows for Confluence to make these everyday tasks much easier.
With more information available in customizable columns, combined filters, saved and shared views, and improved CSV exports, you can find and report on the documents that matter to your team.
Better still, you don’t need to be a Confluence administrator to use it.
What can you use Workflows Search for?
Different teams need different answers. Jump straight to the use case that’s most relevant to you:
- Reviewers and approvers: Find documents waiting for your approval.
- Documentation managers and team leads: Create review queues that everyone can work from.
- Operations and process managers: Identify documents stuck in review or approval.
- Quality and compliance teams: Gather document status and approval evidence for audits.
- Policy and document owners: Find documents approaching expiry before they become outdated.
1. For reviewers and approvers: Know exactly what needs your attention
If you’re responsible for reviewing policies, technical documentation, procedures or other controlled content, approvals can easily get lost among your other priorities.
Rather than opening individual Confluence pages to check what needs your attention, Workflows Search gives you a ready-made personal approval queue.
Try this:
- Open Workflows Search.
- Select Saved views.
- Choose Pending my approval.
You’ll see the pages currently waiting for your approval, along with information about the workflow, status and document.
This view is built in, so there’s nothing to configure.
Why it’s useful: You have one place to check your outstanding approvals whenever you need to catch up, rather than relying on individual page checks.
2. For documentation managers and team leads: Keep everyone working from the same review queue
Managing documentation across several teams can mean hundreds of pages moving through different review stages.
And when reviewers are responsible for different documents, keeping track of everyone’s workload can become a job in itself.
One documentation team told us that repeatedly setting up the same search filters was a particular frustration. Every time they returned, they had to rebuild their view.
Saved and shared views help solve this.
You can create a tailored view for each reviewer, as well as a broader team view that shows which documents are waiting for approval.
Try this:
- Use Filter to select the relevant workflows and Confluence spaces.
- Add Pending approval from to focus on the reviewers you’re responsible for.
- Use Columns to display the details that matter, such as Status, Pending approval from and Time in status.
- Open Saved views to name and save your configuration.
- Select Share view to copy a link for your colleagues.
The shared link carries your filters, columns and their order, so colleagues can open the same configured view without setting it up from scratch.
Why it’s useful: Reviewers can maintain their own queues, while team leads have a consistent way to check progress across the documentation process.
3. For operations and process managers: Find out where documents are getting stuck
A document waiting for approval isn’t necessarily a problem.
A document that’s been sitting in the same review stage for weeks, with nobody noticing, might be.
This is particularly useful for shared services teams, process owners and managers overseeing documentation that needs input from several people or departments.
Workflows Search lets you narrow results by status and transition date, so you can focus on documents that haven’t moved recently.
Try this:
- Open Filter and select the relevant workflow or space.
- Use Status type to find pages at an approval stage, or Status to look for a particular review stage.
- Add Transitioned before and choose a date.
- Display Last transition, Time in status, Pending approval from and Last transitioned by in your columns.
- Sort the results to find documents that have been waiting the longest.
You can also filter by Last transitioned by to see which pages a particular person last moved into their current status.
Save the resulting view as something useful, such as Outstanding documentation reviews, and return to it during your regular team check-ins.
Why it’s useful: You can investigate stalled documents and find out where follow-up is needed, without manually reviewing every page.
Have feedback or an idea for Workflows?
The rebuilt search came directly from customer requests, including Service Desk tickets, Success Reviews and feedback about reporting and audit requirements.
And we’re still listening.
Is there a particular filter, column or reporting capability that would make your work easier?
Our Product and Customer Success teams would love to hear how you’re using Workflows and what you’d like to see next.
Share your feedback or suggest a feature through our Service Desk
4. For quality and compliance teams: Make audit preparation less manual
If you manage controlled documentation, you know how important it is to demonstrate that documents have been reviewed and approved.
Whether you’re preparing for an ISO 9001 or ISO 27001 audit, or supporting internal quality and governance reviews, finding the right information across Confluence spaces can take time.
One of the biggest customer frustrations with the previous Workflows Search was exporting results.
Previously, exports only included the results on the current page of the search table. This meant teams with large numbers of documents had to export multiple pages of results and combine them manually.
Now you can export every matching result in one CSV file.
For teams managing controlled documents across different departments or countries, this makes it easier to collect a consistent set of reporting information.
Try this:
- Filter by the workflows and spaces included in your audit or reporting scope.
- Display the relevant columns, such as Status, Approved by, Previous stage approvers, Last transition and document version information.
- Save a view for each reporting area you regularly need to review.
- Select Export.
- Choose All rows to include every matching result, not just the results currently visible on screen.
- Select either the visible columns or all available columns, and enable Page URL if you want to include a direct link to each document.
- Download your CSV for reporting or further analysis.
Why it’s useful: Instead of rebuilding reports and combining multiple exports each time, you can return to your saved filters and generate a fresh set of results.
5. For policy and document owners: Find content approaching expiry
Getting a policy or controlled document approved is only part of the job.
You also need to know when it should be reviewed again.
If you’re responsible for HR policies, SOPs, technical documentation or other content with review and expiry dates, Workflows Search can help you identify which documents need attention next.
Try this:
- Open Columns.
- Enable Expiry date and Time until expiry.
- Filter to the workflows or spaces you manage.
- Sort by time until expiry to bring the most urgent documents into view.
- Save your view so you can revisit it during your regular documentation reviews.
You can also include the page owner and workflow status to help identify which documents need further investigation.
Why it’s useful: Rather than waiting until a document has expired or checking dates page by page, you can make upcoming reviews part of your normal documentation-management routine.
How to use Workflows Search: Belinda’s step-by-step guide
Our Product Owner, Belinda Polychronakis, demonstrated how to build and share views during our recent Customer Success workshop.
Here’s the process you can follow for any of the use cases above.
Step 1: Open Workflows Search
In Confluence, go to Apps → Workflows. Search opens by default, showing the documents with workflows applied that you can access.
Step 2: Find the documents you need
Use the search bar to search by page, workflow or space name, or open Filter to narrow your results further.
You can combine several filters. For example, choosing a particular space and approval status shows pages matching both conditions.
Step 3: Customize your columns
Select Columns to choose the information you want to display. You can show or hide columns, drag them into a different order and sort results using column headers.
Options include approvers, page owners, last transition dates, expiry dates, document versions and more.
Step 4: Save your view
Once you’re happy with the results, open Saved views, give your configuration a recognizable name and save it.
Your filters, selected columns, column order and sorting are saved together.
Step 5: Share it with colleagues
Select Share view to copy a link. Send it to teammates so they can open the same configured view and save it for themselves.
Step 6: Export your results
Click Export, then choose:
- All rows or Selected rows
- All columns or Selected columns
- Whether to include a Page URL for each document
Download the CSV, keeping the export dialog open until the download completes.
Step 7: Return to your saved views
Use Saved views whenever you want to revisit your regular reporting or approval checks.
You can use Clear all to remove filters, or Reset view to restore the default configuration.
For more information, see our Workflows Search documentation.
Want help getting more from Workflows for Confluence? Talk to Hana!
We know that no two teams manage their documentation in quite the same way.
That’s why our Customer Success Manager, Hana Packford, runs regular feature workshops and personalized Success Reviews to help AppFox customers get more from the apps they’re already using.
Our monthly workshops focus on practical ways to use new and existing functionality, with demonstrations from the people behind our products.
And if you’d like more tailored support, a Success Review is an opportunity to discuss your own setup, goals and challenges. For example, we can explore how your team manages reviews, which reporting views would be useful, or how Workflows could better support your document-control processes.
Already using Workflows for Confluence? We’d love to help you get even more from it.
Get in touch with Hana directly, or contact our team through the Service Desk to ask about arranging a Success Review.
