How did you conduct Cloud migration?

[Dominika Kuraś-Moskwa _Deviniti_]

Hello folks!

I have a question for those who have already migrated from Server to Cloud.

Did you conduct this process on your own? Maybe used Atlassian Partner's help? Or reached to Atlassian Support? Tell me about it!

[Niraj Rai]

We hired a contractor and with help of Atlassian support were able to migrate to Cloud. 

We used Atlassian migration tool.

[Simon Sahli]

We did the migration together with an Atlassian Partner, but did a lot the work by ourselves.
The Atlassian support was also included with a couple of MOVE tickets.

Moreover, for some of the installed Apps we were in contact with the App manufacturer, but that was rather post-migration.

[Greg Wenden]

We had a simple installation and were able to do it ourselves using the Atlassian migration tool.

I did raise a couple of MOVE tickets which were answered quickly. We weren't using any additional apps. There was some custom stuff which stopped working (macros to create template pages from what I remember) but they weren't critical.

I ran a couple of test migrations first and only discovered after running the actual migration that I hadn't cleared everything from the Cloud instance beforehand. This meant there were some duplicate items and therefore the naming of the objects that are in use is a bit weird in places.

[McFall_ David]

My company was running a very old version of Confluence Server.  I had to work through an upgrade (which other teams had tried and failed in the past) to get to a point where space exports would work with Confluence Cloud.  This upgrade required a lot of testing and communication with Atlassian support.

Once that was successful, I gave the userbase six months of lead-time before the migration to Cloud.  I queried the Server database, found as many macros as I could, and sent out lists of page links to macros that would break during the migration (as the company decided that they were not going to pay for any macros in the Cloud).  Weekly status updates to the userbase were extremely helpful to keep everyone prepared for the migration.

We used the migration as a clean-up effort also.  Spaces were migrated individually and only if a user requested it (if no one wanted a space moved, why keep the content).  That worked rather well... even if it was a challenge to track.

After the migration, there were plenty of issues with macros, because the content owners didn't take the time to clean-up or restructure their pages.  I helped and advised on how to fix pages, without taking on the work of actually fixing those pages.

There were also a lot of link issues.  Many links were created as external links (using the full URL) and so they would point back to the Server instance.  Atlassian was able to run some scripts that updated most of them, though I still occasionally find a link with a Server URL.

We had a separate team take over support and accounts after the migration.  That different accounts were used caused some confusion, as did the new account creation process.  And of course I've done a lot of redirecting people to the new support team since everyone connects my name with Confluence.

All things considered, it was a very successful migration.