Solution to migration errors related to inactive users from AD?

[Nancy Good]

I'm trying to test out the migration of Confluence from Server to Cloud and the migration is failing due to thousands of inactive users who are no longer at the company and therefore, don't have a valid email address. I've seen some related posts on this issue but can't find a solution other than maybe using an older version of the "Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant"? How do we avoid migrating these users?

[reuben_hollifield · Accepted solution]

@Nancy Good 

Hi Nancy!  We had an issue similar to this where somehow, we had duplicate users in Jira/Confluence with duplicate email addresses.  We also had users pulling in from Active Directory with no email addresses.  When we ran the Migration Check it kept failing and would not let us move forward.  

The solution we used was two fold: 

• For users without an email address, we updated the Jira database table to add a unique dummy email, something like "noreply1@business.com, noreply2@business.com". 
• For users with duplicate addresses, we figured out which were no longer in use by the user and added a "1" to the end of the duplicate in the Jira database.  

Before we updated the database, we also turned off the AD Sync for the duration of the migration so that it would not overwrite the data and cause the users to revert.

Both of these solutions fixed the issue long enough to successfully migrate. 

Hope this helps!  

[Nancy Good]

Thank you

[Nancy Good]

How does one turn off the AD sync? I'm still unable to get past this issue even though I've removed all the inactive users from the groups in Confluence.

[Bharadwaj Jannu]

@Nancy Good 

You can try the resolution mentioned in https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloudkb/resolve-invalid-email-addresses-when-migrating-to-the-cloud-1101932321.html and https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloudkb/resolve-duplicate-email-addresses-when-migrating-to-the-cloud-1101932318.html

Make sure you do a backup of the database before making changes.

[Nancy Good]

Hi, this is not the solution as the user's email addresses that are causing the issue are not confluence users at all. It looks like Confluence is pulling in users from AD that are actually no longer at the company, they are inactive/disabled users. 

[Krista Stellar]

@Nancy Good we have faced this when supporting some of our clients migrations and feel your pain.

You don't mention in your original post, or this follow up reply, whether you are trying to migrate ALL users or not. One way to narrow down the scope of your situation would be to only migrate users that are related to the spaces you are migrating (instead of migrating all the users in the Confluence server user table). That way you can focus on just the user profiles that you would want to migrate to retain user tombstone information (i.e. for page authors/editors and comments).

The other approach is to try to clean up your Confluence user directory before you attempt to migrate. One way is what @Bharadwaj Jannu has mentioned here - following the suggestions linked. If your Confluence server is using an external directory (e.g. perhaps to LDAP server or Active Directory server) then you could take a look at the configuration. By adjusting the configuration to sync changes with your external directory you may find that these inactive users are removed. The other configuration to consider is whether there is a suitable filter being applied to the external directory syncing.

Dealing with user migration is one of the more complex aspects of the migration journey and we find can take considerable time and effort to resolve. Don't lose heart!

[Hostt Bo]

One workaround is to clean up your user directory before migration. For example, you can disable or remove inactive users on your Confluence Server so that they aren’t picked up during the migration. Alternatively, you might adjust your migration process to filter out accounts with invalid emails. You could also consider mapping inactive users to a generic dummy account during migration. For more detailed instructions, check out this.