Lots of hoops to jump through to import an older-version dump from Confluence

[mharley]

I'm trying to keep Confluence alive in a company that now favors SharePoint.  Did a full .zip dump of our team's Confluence space just before IT took our internal Confluence server offline forever.  Now, when I try to import it in a newly created Confluence account, hosted by Atlassian, I find our company was using an older version that can't be imported.  The 7.x (current) instance will not import older (5.3 or earlier) dumps.  The solution is apparently a somewhat awkward:  “install v5.3, load the dump file, do an upgrade to 7.x, make a dump of THAT Confluence space and now it can be imported into the Atlassian-hosted v7.x Confluence”.  Of course, we are a Mac shop, so I had to find a Windows PC to install v5.3 on, and secured a 30-day trial license.  Don’t want to pay just to do a simple format conversion.  Guess what?  The trial version does not have the ability to import a Confluence space.  Atlassian – you are making this simple “import of a space to keep Confluence alive for our team” take so many steps it’s not worth fighting with!  Yes, I could *buy* a license just to do the format conversion.  We love Confluence, but this cumbersome process is leading me to say (sadly) maybe we’ll just stick with SharePoint.  Yuck.  Anyone have another suggestion?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I feel your pain, but part of that is generic and not limited to just Atlassian stuff - when you have old software that has been neglected and not upgraded regularly, you come to expect the pain of having to move through several steps.

I would like to talk about some bits of what you've said as specifics though:

>Of course, we are a Mac shop, so I had to find a Windows PC to install v5.3 on,

One of my current projects has 5.4 running on a Mac.  And as the project is about getting a really old version up to 7.4, the same Mac has 3.0, 4.1, 6.0, 6.13 and 7.4 running on it.  And the other machine has the same, but is running Linux.

You didn't need to find a windows box to run this.  (In fact, you've probably made it harder than you needed to, as windows is a poor platform to run anything other than MS software on)

>and secured a 30-day trial license.  Don’t want to pay just to do a simple format conversion.  Guess what?  The trial version does not have the ability to import a Confluence space.  

Eh?  Yes it does.  I ired up and used an evaluation system literally yesterday to test an import.  Both total restore and space import worked fine.  The only difference between an evaluation and a full licence is that an evalution expires.

So, I think where I'm stuck on answering this one is asking why what works fine for me does not work for you?  (For example what errors do you get when trying to import a space into Cloud?)