An efficient export procedure (exit strategy) is a must for accepting to move to Cloud.

Question

Hi,

I'd like to share my thoughts about the Atlassian's decision to change  the licensing model.

Because this is the most critical factor, at least in my company.

It's not the move from local to cloud, it's the move from perpetual to yearly.

We're happy with our server instances, and we're happy to renew our maintenance subscriptions.

But we need to feel sure to be able to not loose all the job done, in case we'd decide to move to a different solution in future.

We need to have the chance to continue having access to our nicely formatted Confluence Pages as a minimum.

If we move to Cloud from Server to Cloud and then decide to cancel our subscription, what can we do with our data, even if we download it? We'd have no more an application to access to these pages.

The HTML export options I've seen so far are not yet generating html pages of the same quality of the Confluence-rendered pages.

We'll need to find a solution for this, before really considering to move to Atlassian's cloud.

I need to ensure my management that they'll continue to have access to all the documentation, attachments and interlinked pages that they've collected in this years, in the same easy way, with the only limit of a read-only mode (just as browsing a website).

Already started to look for the best export option, but haven't found yet a very good one.

I'd like to hear voices from othe people on this.

Maybe I'm just too worried, but this move was really not a help for us.

Ciao, Andrea

PS

Not even mentioning the current limits of the Cloud version of Confluence.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Yes, that's why I tried to emphasise "technical" in my comment, DC is in no way an answer or solution for you, it was just to say that you could export a Cloud system and get the same content out in another system.  It's not a solution, just a backup and (because you can mess with DC/Server code) a possible step in a full migration off Atlassian.

ABoerio · Answer

Thank you @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Just don't understand how Data Center would help in this case. It's still a subscription based license, and the users threshold is 500 ... I actually forgot to mention that we're only about 50 happy users (a bit less happy now... :-)).

I agree that waiting a bit is the best way, at least for all this year.

But in the meanwhile, I've started already to dedicate quite a lot of time on Scriptrunner, and not only, to generate an exported static web site made up of pages from Confluence and Jira Issues (as we use both, jointly as an integrated project management system).

Thanks for your hints. Andrea

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

There's a couple of points in there I can give a quick technical answer to, but I think there's a much bigger discussion to be had on the rest of it, and I'd be very interested in a conversation on this.

>If we move to Cloud from Server to Cloud and then decide to cancel our subscription, what can we do with our data, even if we download it?

Data Center is not going away for the foreseeable future.  Cloud can create backups that are suitable for import into DC, so you do have one route to get a working thing out, whether even if it's just to give you a bit more flexibility while you work on a migration to something else .

There is also a way to hang on to what you've got on Server too - Server licences are "perpetual", your server systems will continue to work fine after the licence expires.  So you could just keep your server running, or at least just installed and ready to re-activate if needed.  It'll have the pre-cloud-migration data in it, and you could merge down from Cloud or even restore the Cloud backup.  I suspect Cloud -> Server functionality will not be deprecated any time soon, as people will still need and want Cloud -> DC, and the exports for DC are the same as server ones (for now, that may change after Server goes out of support)

The other thing I'd say is maybe plan to wait a bit.  The main reason I suggest this to people is that the Atlassian migration tools are improving all the time, making the server -> cloud process easier, but in this case, I'd also want to wait a bit to see how the Cloud systems change (and hopefully improve) - it may be that in 18 months time, they've done enough that you do consider Cloud a good and safe platform to move to.