App Assessment: Adding transparency and flexibility to migrations

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Over the past 2 years we’ve made major improvements to our cloud products, released new features, and invested heavily in our cloud platform to better meet your needs. As such, we’ve seen growing demand not just for cloud, but for robust tools that help existing Server and Data Center customers make the switch. 

To better support customers evaluating and migrating to cloud, we’ve been working hard on the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant. These tools don’t just help migrate data from on-premise to cloud, but they also help customers understand how apps can impact their migration. In partnership with our Marketplace partners, we’ve been focused on increasing app availability in cloud, as well as improving cloud app functionality and capabilities. In fact, there were over 250 new cloud apps added in 2019, and 117 new cloud apps added in the first quarter of this year (more than 2 every business day)!

We understand that apps play a large part of every migration strategy, which is why we’ve recently improved the App Assessment capabilities within our migration tooling. With App Assessment, you can easily review the apps your team is currently using, see what’s available in cloud, and make decisions on which apps are a business priority for migration.

Even if cloud migration is not in the immediate future for your team, App Assessment is the easiest way to review what apps your team currently uses and understand the cloud alternatives that are available in the Marketplace.

In this post, we’ll talk about new App Assessment functionality now available via the Confluence Cloud Migration assistant, as well as what’s available in the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant (and what’s coming soon). 

The Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant

The Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant is a free app for Server and Data Center that allows you to easily move multiple spaces to cloud at once, migrate users and groups, and monitor progress on the backend—without disrupting your teams.

We’ve recently released new App Assessment functionality within the app that not only lets you review app availability, but now also displays app usage and migration paths to help you make an informed decision when it comes to migration.

• Get started quickly with a simple view of all your Server or Data Center apps.
  Instantly obtain a simple, easy-to-use report of all of your current apps, including basic information such as the app name, the number of pages it appears on, the number of viewers, cloud availability, and migration pathways. 

• Identify which apps your teams are actually using that you will, or need to be migrated to cloud
  You can easily view which apps are the most used, and which apps are not being used as often (and perhaps don’t need to be migrated). Clean house and Marie Kondo the apps that your teams no longer feel joy for.

• Identify if there is a cloud equivalent for your apps - and potential alternatives.
  Save time from manually looking up apps - data is pulled automatically from Marketplace to check if there is a cloud equivalent for your apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. If your app doesn’t exist, you can now search for alternatives directly through the app assessment tool.

• Once you’ve identified the apps to migrate, understand the potential differences between versions.
  The app assessment tool provides information from Marketplace partners to indicate what differences in functionality (if any) you should expect when migrating from server to cloud.
  
  
  
• Once you’ve completed assessing your apps, you can start the migration process.
  App Assessment also includes error checking and pre-flight checks to help make sure your migration is successful with as little data loss as possible.

The Jira Cloud Migration Assistant

As we announced in March, the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant is now in beta! Now you can migrate users, projects, and data from server to cloud in a simple, step-by-step process that increases flexibility and transparency compared to the previous, export and re-upload process.

The Jira Cloud Migration Assistant also includes App Assessment, and most of the functionality discussed above (audit list of apps, Marketplace availability, decision framework, and notes) with more features being released in the coming weeks!

These tools are useful to provide a better understanding of what apps you’re running, what your team is using, and to help you make an informed decision when considering cloud migration. To learn more about cloud apps and migration, visit our Cloud App Series in the Atlassian Community and the Cloud Migration Center for resources, best practices, and migration support.

To check out App Assessment, simply download the free apps below to get full access:

• Download the Confluence Cloud Migration assistant

• Download the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant

If you want to learn how to use the tool, read our guide on assessing and migrating apps with the Cloud Migration Assistant.