Export a space for campaign and reimport modified space in production - Best practice?

Question

Hey guys,
we have another question. We are slowly rolling out Confluence as our main documentation and intranet platform in a scientific institute. Each work group has its own space. Now, our scientific groups come up with the following specification:

when they go on a campaing, they want to continue documenting/ altering in their "main" space from the production Confluence.

So, they want to export their production space, import it in a 10 user licensed Confluence on a Notebook, and continue working. When back in the institute, they want to reimport the modified space/ pages in the production Confluence.

I've tested the space import/ export functionalities, what I dislike are 2 facts:

* a global admin has to do it
* the space has to be deleted prior importing with the same space ID* so any change in the production installation during campaing would be lost

Any other ideas on how to accomplish this?

Thank you in advance!

Bruce Schlueter · Answer

The problem will always be that you may have changes in both environment and to merge these is sheer impossible. How do you want to decide which is the latest?

What I have done already is to export a space, open the zip and rename all occurances of the space name inside the files, zip the files again and reimport it with the new name.

You can then move pages from one space into another. This worked for me, perhaps give it a try with a small test space.

Sascha Backes · Answer

Hi Alex,
thank you for your reply. Our Confluence is available via VPN from the Internet, but going on campaign sometime means being in the middle of nowhere without proper or sometimes any access to the Internet. Sorry for not stating this explicitly in my post. :)

The Source Editor might be a temporary option, I will definitely have a look at this one.

Though, still happy for other suggestions ;)

Cheers

Alejandro Conde Carrillo · Answer

A very obvious option, have you thought about making your Confluence instance available on internet? That way they could modify the actual page from home, no need for exports/mports.

A "low tech" option, you could install Confluence Source Editor plugin and make your users, copy/paste the storage format from their local instance.

A las toption, you could develop a simple "page migrator" using Confluence API.