Addteq recently had the opportunity to help a leading authority on commercial real estate investment markets with their Server to Cloud migration of Jira and Confluence.  

The Situation

The most important part of an Atlassian server to cloud migration is the inventory and assessment. During this phase, a determination and count of users, Jira projects, and Confluence spaces are made, along with third-party add-ons and customizations.  Once inventoried, the customer then reviews this information and determines what needs to be migrated and what can be left behind. This is crucial, not just to determine what needs to be migrated but how.  

Several methods are available to choose from to migrate Atlassian server products to the Cloud, as shown below.  The findings of your assessment will help you make the right choice.

The easiest of the migration methods uses the Atlassian Cloud Migration Assistants to perform the migrations. It’s important to note that the Cloud Migration Assistants are not yet a complete solution.  You should be aware of the following:

• App data is not migrated when using the tool; to migrate any relevant data, you’ll need to work with the vendors for your particular apps. Some apps can export and import their data, but you’ll need to check with the app developers or their documentation to confirm if this is possible. 
• Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk) data cannot be migrated with the Cloud Migration Assistant – you must use Jira Site Import or CSV import instead.
• Advanced Roadmaps (formerly Portfolio for Jira) data will not be migrated.
• You’ll need to be on a supported self-managed version – your licenses must be active on your server instances.
• The Cloud Migration Assistant can’t migrate some Jira data.   This includes mail handlers, certain types of custom fields, workflow attributes, and more. For more information, see what can and can’t be migrated by the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant.

In this case, the customer was not using Advanced Roadmaps or Jira Service Desk, nor were they looking to retain any information on their Cloud site.  Therefore it was possible to migrate their data using the cloud migration assistants.

The Challenge

After narrowing down the Jira Projects list to migrate, and before contacting Addteq, the customer had made several attempts to migrate data, some of which were partially successful but had underlying failures. Addteq was brought in to investigate the failures and find a plan for moving all of the data safely. 

After taking a full inventory of the project spaces and add-ons, Addteq reviewed the current failures and performed several test migrations, with a growing number of failures per attempt. After reaching out to Atlassian for assistance, we discovered that migration artifacts were still present on both the server and cloud instances – each attempt to migrate data left a residual artifact that, when missing, caused a failure. This accounted for some, but not all, issues.  Several other issues were found and fixed; some projects had potential exposure to anonymous users. Some workflows had workflow conditions based on a custom field that the customer deleted in the past. Updates to the Cloud Migration Assistant tools also seemed to help move the process forward, seemingly addressing issues that complicate the process and prevent all issues from moving forward.

The Solution

After fixing these issues, deleting all content on the cloud site, and deleting the server’s migration artifacts, we could migrate all data successfully using the Cloud Migration Assistants. The Atlassian Cloud Migration Assistant cannot migrate some Jira data – fields of certain types and other information are beyond its capabilities. (see what can and can’t be migrated by the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant)  Addteq analyzed the customer’s data, identified the specific data that we could not migrate, and presented it to the customer.  This data was determined to be non-essential and OK to omit during the migration.  Addteq delivered a report containing this information to have it on hand if the customer wanted to reassociate it with the issues. The comments were added back to the issues as file attachments so the information would not be lost.

After migrating data from Server to Cloud, Addteq thoroughly tested Jira and Confluence before handing the site over to the customer for user acceptance testing. Once UAT was complete, we scheduled a full production migration, cleared all the artifacts from the server, wiped the cloud site, and migrated all Jira and Confluence data from Server to Cloud as though it were the first attempt. 

The Outcome

Immediately after migrating Jira and Confluence to the Atlassian Cloud, the customer onboarded their user base and began using the tools in earnest.  The customer was delighted with the outcome, as the transition from Server to Cloud was seamless for their users and organization.