This function is absolutely essential, too!

The request is now almost 17 years old and nothing has happened. It`s unbelievable.

This function is absolutely essential!
The fact that renaming groups is not possible regularly leads to a lot of problems and effort for us, including SQL renamings....
The request is now almost 17 years old and nothing has happened.

This is not working in the Confluence Cloud either. Come on Atlassian! 
I really agree with Ricky Wang who said: 
"Like many other here, renaming AD groups due to organizational restructuring happens and I happen to be going through it now and unfortunately landed on this thread....  It is quite an impactful design flaw that I'm surprised is still collecting dust..." 

We change organizational names all the time and it is an administrative nightmare to delete groups and add them again to satisfy confluence. This is not a good solution since we use the AD groups on many fileshares too. And since confluence cloud not supports nested groups either this is making everything very difficult!  

Agree with comments. Basic web development best practices demand a unique id that is immune to display name changes. 

We're utilizing groups to handle teams access...a team changes a name and then this group is obsolete (the name)...this isn't acceptable (also the fact that were using the groups to show the members and now were stuck with the old name (with User List macro...that doesn't even allow to hide the name )...

Like in SharePoint or other web applications the AD groups should be unique by their ID and not by the display name or group name. In SharePoint it is not needed to change any permission when an AD group changed the name.

Guys.  This is pretty nuts.

Like many other here, renaming AD groups due to organizational restructuring happens and I happen to be going through it now and unfortunately landed on this thread....  It is quite an impactful design flaw that I'm surprised is still collecting dust...

a3e3471153f4 The workaround is linked above, in the description (https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-rename-a-group-and-preserve-its-permissions-948228977.html)

Again we have to rename Organization unit names from our HR system synched into our AD and that was synched into our Confluence Wiki. All group permissions would be lost and the groups have the status "Group not found" in the space. User have no access. Now we try to repair that via SQL in the database. Any idea how to workaround that?

3 years after the comment of the Confluence Product Management

... We will provide a further update in a few months time....

there is still no resolution for this really big impact if group names where changed in our Windows AD. (Same problem in JIRA).
It can't be a rocket science to implement the same logic (display_name) for the groups as it's implemented for the users

We are talking about software that's no longer a bargain after the server licenses are discontinued.

Same here...

With a restructuring of our organisation all AD mail groups was renamed, which are used as permission elements in confluence!
Confluence cannot synchronise this name change of groups and all permissions are lost.

Renaming mail groups is a normal function in AD. Why Atlassian didn't take care of this function when implementing LDAP?

Renaming a group in active directory does not rename the group in confluence. It generates a new Group! We do not need new groups with no permissions, we need the old groups with old permissions and just a new name. I would be very happy about a soon solution!

Dear team,

the impact for renaming groups in Atlassian are so complicated that we need a solution to rename groups directly in Atlassian or via AD connection. We have different organizational team renamings in one year. Currently we have to rename all groups manuelly.

Best regards

Windows Groups are often renamed because of organisation changes. 
Confluence Sync sees the changed group names, but the space permissions remain with the old now non existing group names.

Sad

I can understand that it's a hard step or a lot of consideration to create a rename function when ldap etc. is used, but in case of simple local groups there shouldn't be a problem. Please split the solution and release a rename function for local groups - we have the year 2020!

Really?? You can't rename a group? Organizations change their name all the time. This is really critical, and surprising it isn't there. Please consider adding this function to rename a group.

I'm afraid sarcasm doesnt shame Atlassian into fixing these things. The Copy Space issue has been open since May 2005 and has a combined vote approaching 1400 and its still "not on the roadmap". Please vote for it! CONFSERVER-3191

This request is only 13 years old.

We have to wait for the 15th anniversary before this will be considered.

Maybe Atlassian should raise the license fee (again) to have capacity to add something simple as that

</sarcasm>

We use Server edition of confluence, and utilize Secure for confluence plugin to control access for sensitive information. So we have group based security rules controlling access for different parts of the same page. So we can not delete group because we will lost all security acls that was set up years ago.

Please implement this very simple feature - ability to rename groups.

We have a large Windows Active Directory (AD) structure consisting of thousands of users and AD groups spread across a large OU structure. Each site has a need for their own OU and so the entire AD structure needs synching for groups and users. Ous staff may be added or removed from AD groups on a daily basis, and Confluence needs to be able to recognise those changes quickly.

I understand that only a full sync of AD updates group names - an incremental one does not (and it seems that Confluence must use the group name to identify the group rather than the GUID or SID of the group as stored in AD).

An incremental sync of this structure is very quick (seconds) but a full sync takes > 12 hours to complete, so we have to perform incremental syncs normally. These don't catch group name changes and so any name changes to existing groups that we do undertake require modification of Confluence back to full sync and a 12 hour delay in recognition of the change by Confluence.

Please consider prioritising this - security management of data is now a major concern for companies and Confluence really should be able to handle this sort of thing just as most other modern apps do.

Thanks

We now had several times the need to rename usergroups because of reorganization. It was hard to believe, that such a basic functionality isn't included, yet. 

Please offer this function in one of the next releases. Thank you very much. By the way, it's the same with Jira Software

As we are growing and adding new users, employees and partners to Confluence, we need to review and reorganize the groups to better assign permissions.

Hence, renaming groups is really a must-have. For instance, the default groupe confluence-users is really ugly now, even if it made our life easier at the beginning.

We are using LDAP for user authentication, but the groups are local.

We are undertaking a migration from one system to another and there is a possibility that there are common group names on both systems. We will be using local groups and not LDAP synced groups so this feature should be available even if its a manual process inside the Admin UI.

Has anyone attempted to rename the groups at SQL level recently? Looking at the SQL code above, its from Confluence 3.1 and 2.10 which is a very long time ago.

Ii would be very useful, as for the moment it's time wasting... Thanks a lot!  

We would need to rename local groups, which include a few hundred of users.

In addition, we totally agree with this request:

"We would also like to allow groups to be able to have non-administrator owners who can edit the group membership and other attributes.  For instance, a given project may have several (up to a dozen) spaces.  In this case, using group membership for permissions is a huge time saver, but since only admins can manipulate groups, this rarely gets used."

Granting permissions to user groups is very convenient, but only confluence-administrators can manage them.

It would be great to have the possibility to delegate changes to user groups (e.g. add, remove or modify users) to space administrators.

Many thanks

After using Confluence for 7 years, we have group names that are no longer supported because of business changes. We use these groups for communication purposes, identification in the user database, and some have permissions attached for specific spaces. It would be extremely convenient to be able to rename the group names as needed, leaving the group member lists intact.

We have many local groups reflecting teams or organizations whose names have changed.  We would like a way to change the names without just making new groups and repopulating them by hand or fooling around in SQL.

We would also like to allow groups to be able to have non-administrator owners who can edit the group membership and other attributes.  For instance, a given project may have several (up to a dozen) spaces.  In this case, using group membership for permissions is a huge time saver, but since only admins can manipulate groups, this rarely gets used.

For us, we need something that performs like the "unique user id attribute" field for user accounts. Our groups change their display names from time to time and because Confluence uses "Group Name Attribute" as both the display name and the unique id, renaming a group can cause immense pain. Any mentions of the group whether space/global  permissions (Easy to fix) or page level restrictions (incredibly hard to fix) must be changed.

Currently we're using local groups - we create a group called "Amazing Product Named Bob" or similar, and assign users and begin using it as intended.

Later management renames the product to "Amazing Product Named Jim" and we now either have outdated group references, or we have to recreate and reassign everyone again. With large groups this is a metric pain.

We use local groups

Hello! Like others we have the problem (or actually luck) that our company is growing and during that process also department names and team names and so also group names change; further this is also something that happens even if a company isn't growing anymore, but if there are some structural changes and so on. This fact makes it necessary to have the possibility to change group names to have consistent names in the system. If you can't change group names it's getting more and more confusing over time when managing JIRA and in Confluence since the groups have different names in the domain, in Outlook or in other programs used. Please fix this!!!!

Thanks ncarbonneau 
I haven't see that this issue is 11 years old.

Then I'll probably have to look for a way in the database

Henning.Karl1210001668, This issue has been opened for 11 years without any attention from Atlassian. Don't wait for them, they won't fix.

We have a name change of a department in the company.
This changes the group names from xtp-ics to xt-ics.
We need an option to do this without creating a new group by name, otherwise we will need to adjust the space permissions in about 200 spaces. And that is a very high effort that will always come back to us.

I agree, this is something very basic for user management, it should be given high priority given the impact on usability.

We need this function, too. 

This is certainly something that we support and need. The sooner the better. 

+1 from The Courseware Company

While you are patiently waiting for this to be implemented (or for the heat death of the universe, whatever comes first), please avail yourselves to a complimentary picture of Jesus (i.e. the co-CEO) on the Confluence login page!

Basic stuff. Please add this in the near releases.

I "+1". This basic feature is definitely required.

I can't believe that a basic functionality like this does not exist for the on-demand version. JIRA can do it. Why confluence can't. #FAIL

@ Huw Morgan - I agree on your arguments. CRUD helps to cover the basic functions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete

Seems like this is basic functionality that is missing. Did someone forget it? This particular issue was raised over seven years ago, what are the chances of this getting resolved/addressed?

Is this still not possible natively in Confluence without running SQL commands? What are our options as Atlassian On-Demand customers?

Doing this in Confluence 3.1 we did the following to match LDAP security group name changes in the linked Active Directory:

update content_perm 
set groupname = gr.new_name
from group_renames gr
where groupname = gr.old_name
;

update spacepermissions 
set permgroupname = gr.new_name
from group_renames gr
where permgroupname = gr.old_name
;

It worked great - there were only 2 tables, one controlling groups for content (restricted pages) and the other controlling space access/privs.

Many thanks to Frank Stiller for his post as well as the Confluence data model page put up by Matt Hodges and updated by Andrew Lui:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=179439242

-wc

well i can only talk for success on MySQL, but i added some new elements for a Confluence 2.10:
some of these elements are placeholders, at least my spacegroups are empty, so if anyone has some valid data we can check that without atlassians confirmation ...

update content_perm          x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.groupname = z.oldgroupname set groupname = z.newgroupname;
update contentlock           x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.groupname = z.oldgroupname set groupname = z.newgroupname;
update groups                x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.groupname = z.oldgroupname set groupname = z.newgroupname;
update os_group              x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.groupname = z.oldgroupname set groupname = z.newgroupname;
update spacegrouppermissions x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.permgroupname = z.oldgroupname set permgroupname = z.newgroupname;
update spacegroups           x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.spacegroupname = z.oldgroupname set spacegroupname = z.newgroupname;
update spacegroups           x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.spacegroupkey = z.oldgroupname set spacegroupkey = z.newgroupname;
update spacepermissions      x inner join tab_groupmigration z on x.permgroupname = z.oldgroupname set permgroupname = z.newgroupname;

Does anyone have a version of this query that will work under Postgresql (for the DB) and Confluence 2.7.1 and higher?

It seems like the scheme of 2.7.1 is different than what is referred in this ticket.

We use LDAP (Windows Active Directory) integration for the authentification and the permission in Confluence. Sometime the name of a group change in our ADS. We need to be able to change the name of the group in Confluence also because you store only the name of the group and not the unique identifier of the group.

I check the DB model and I figure it out that a SQL statement like the one in Frank first comment will do the job.

It's could be a good improvement for us if Atlassian give a more "standard" way to do it.

For the SQL-Script:
For sure you need first a Table tab_groupmigration with 2 columns (both varchar 255), oldgroupname and newgroupname.

I just thought about it and there are some macros in confluence which use the groupname (visibility and userlister for example). So you should additionally check the memo-fields for these, somehow. As it is the same problem like on the renaming of the username you must make a SQL-Dump or a XML-Export, change the textfile and reimport the data back to confluence.

@Paul: To be honestly, i dont think this will be implemented within the next months, as the userrenaming is open for several years now and has much more votes.