Documentation

Everything a manager needs, in the order they meet it.

1. Install and open the app

Install ReadSeal from the Atlassian Marketplace. It appears in Confluence in three places:

• The app page, under Apps in the Confluence menu: campaigns, tracking, By person, and your own pending confirmations.
• The ••• menu of any page: ask for a confirmation on the page you are reading.
• Under the title of a tracked page: the counter readers click to confirm.

2. Decide who can manage campaigns

Confluence administrators always can. Beyond that, an administrator opens the app settings and names the groups allowed to manage campaigns, for example a compliance team. Nothing is open by default: a fresh install starts closed.

The same screen carries three other choices:

• Which campaigns a manager sees: all of them, those launched by a member of their own manager groups, or only their own.
• How long closed campaigns are kept in the app: always, or 1, 3, 5 or 10 years. The campaign pages in Confluence are never touched by this.
• Guests: whether people with guest access can be asked to confirm. Off by default.

3. Launch a campaign

1. Name it as the record should read: "Information security policy 2026", not "test".
2. Choose the pages. A label (the recommended way: put the same label on every page to be attested), a page tree, a list of pages, or a whole space. Space homepages are left out: Confluence shows no counter there.
3. Choose who must confirm. Named people, Confluence groups, or both. People who join an assigned group later are added on their own, with their own due date. Service accounts, deactivated accounts and guests are left out, and the form says how many.
4. Set a due date, from tomorrow on, and the reminders: 7 days and 1 day before, then daily or weekly once late, only once late, or never.
5. Add an attestation text if the reading must be accepted, for example "I have read and accept the information security policy". The reader ticks it before confirming, and its exact wording is recorded with each confirmation.
6. Repeat it every year, six months or quarter, if the policy has to be attested again. Each round has its own record.

Before you launch, the form says how many people will have to confirm how many pages, and names what it left out. After the launch, ReadSeal prepares the pages, writes the campaign page, and checks that every recipient can open every page.

4. The register and the campaign page

The first campaign filed in a space asks you to create a register: one page that lists the campaigns of that space. You create it yourself, which is how Confluence checks you may write there; ReadSeal writes everything else.

Each campaign then gets its own campaign page under that register: the request, a task per person, each person's status and confirmed version, and a CSV report attached. It is the document an auditor opens, and Confluence exports it to PDF like any page.

5. What readers see

A counter under the page title, for example "7/12 confirmed v3". Clicking it opens the "I have read it" button, with the attestation text if the campaign has one. One click answers every campaign waiting on that page. Readers also find everything still expected of them in the app, under "My confirmations".

A confirmation is refused, on purpose, when the page changed while it was being read, when the app cannot read the page's current version, or for an anonymous visitor: a record that cannot name a version or a person is worth nothing.

6. Follow it

• Tracking: one card per campaign, the confirmations, the pages done, the people without access, and a table of its pages. From there you can send a reminder, take a page out, stop a repetition, or close the campaign.
• By person: pick someone and see every page they were asked to confirm, in the campaigns you can see, with the version and the date. This is what an auditor sampling people asks for. It is also where you remove one person from a campaign, when they should never have been in it.

7. People who leave

Every night ReadSeal looks at the accounts of the people it is still waiting for. A deactivated or deleted account is marked "Account deactivated" with the date: no longer counted in the total, no longer chased. What they confirmed while employed stays confirmed. If the account comes back before the campaign closes, their requests reopen.

A manager can also remove one person by hand, from the By person tab. Their line stays on the campaign page, with the date and the name of the manager who removed them.

8. Close and seal

Closing a campaign stops the requests, takes its counters off the pages, and records anyone still open as not confirmed. The campaign page is written a last time and sealed: that version is final, with its CSV attached, and the app never writes it again. Campaigns are never deleted from the app; closing freezes the record.

9. Limits worth knowing

• 1,000 recipients per campaign. Beyond that, split it, one group per campaign for instance.
• Mobile apps. Atlassian does not render Forge apps in the Confluence mobile apps: readers confirm from a browser, on a phone or anywhere else.
• Attached files. A confirmation is bound to the page version. Replacing an attached PDF does not change that version, so nobody is asked again: keep the text people must read on the page itself.
• Reminders are Confluence comments that mention only the people concerned, sent between 7 am and 10 pm in the campaign's time zone. The app never sends email itself; Confluence notifies people as it does for any mention or task.

FAQ

Does ReadSeal send my data anywhere?

No. It has no external host declared, which is what the "Runs on Atlassian" badge attests. Everything it stores lives in Atlassian's Forge storage, in your site's region. See Security.

What exactly is recorded when someone confirms?

Their Atlassian account id, the page, the exact version number they had on screen, the date and time, and a fingerprint of the attestation text if the campaign had one. No names, no email addresses.

What happens when a page is republished?

Everyone is asked again, and the earlier confirmation is kept on record: the campaign page shows both "to confirm again" and the version each person had confirmed. A campaign can also be launched with that reset switched off, when a new version does not call for a new attestation.

Can someone confirm for somebody else?

No. The identity comes from the Atlassian session, never from the page or from anything the browser sends.

Can a manager edit the evidence?

The campaign page is an ordinary Confluence page: someone with the right to edit it can. Every version of it is written by the app, so a version by anyone else stands out in the page history, with its author and date. A sealed page is never rewritten by the app again.

Is this an electronic signature?

No. ReadSeal records a confirmation bound to a version and a person, which is what ISO 27001 and SOC 2 auditors ask for on policy acknowledgement. It does not re-authenticate the signer, so it does not meet 21 CFR Part 11.

What happens to the evidence if we uninstall the app?

The campaign pages, their CSV files and the registers stay in Confluence: they are your content. The app's own tracking data is deleted by Atlassian after the uninstall.

Who can see who confirmed what?

The managers you designated, under the visibility rule an administrator chose, and anyone who can open the campaign page in Confluence, under that space's permissions. Readers see their own confirmations.

Does it work for contractors and external people?

Yes, if they are Confluence guests and an administrator allows guests in the settings. A guest only sees one space, so pages outside it show as "no access" in tracking rather than as a missing confirmation.

We already use an approval app. Do they conflict?

No. Approvals decide whether a page may be published; ReadSeal proves it was read afterwards. They sit on the same page without touching each other.