Licensing question

[Shawn Rodier]

I have a unique licensing situation dealing with an on-premise jira instance migrating to a government (DoD) jira progam.  I'm trying to get some help about licencing timelines between what I have locally and dealing with migrating to the government environment.

I've currently been on hold via phone for 2 hours and 3 minutes, which is unbelievable.

I need to talk to someone.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

One thing that Atlassian do is "simple" licence schemes.  Not in the sense that they are simple to understand, but in the sense that they don't play tricks like bait-and-switch or disappearing-discounts. If it's more complex than "what is on the website", there might be some room to talk, but it can get slow (and they tend to deflect that on to partners.  Yes, I work for one, but licences are not my field, and my lot are no better placed than any other in this case so I can't advertise)

They publish their licence schemes openly too, and don't diverge unless there's a particularly pressing reason.

So it is quite easy for me to start to answer this question.  What is this "unique licencing situation"?  (Not "what client", but "what is the client's peculiar requirement"?)

You mention timelines and migrations.  Much as I've had problems with moves, migrations, licences, and... and... and... with Atlassian, one thing that has never been a problem is "intention".  Getting a pile of licences to enable a change from a cruddy setup to one that works - not a problem.  The developer licences cover 95% of cases.  Atlassian look at the intent and the end state, not the minutiae legal details.

Could you give us a brief (anonymised) overview of what you have now, and where you want to end up at the end of your project?

[Shawn Rodier]

We assumed a contract from another vendor.  They were hosting the Atlassian licenses on their corporate site.  Our government customer wants us to transition to using a government hosted Atlassian tool suite.  It will take some time to get JIRA configured on the government hosted atlassian site to deal with the custom fields & import the current repository.  I have more than 10 developers.  I need licenses for about 1 quarter while I work the transition from my on premise site to the governments site. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, you can use evaluation licences to get started - they last 30 days each, and you can extend twice before having to talk to Atlassian.

A better option though might be to just pay for the $10 licence and only have (up to) 10 users while you configure it all (I can't imagine it would take more than 10 admins 90 days to configure a new Jira and test it).

Also if you're taking the data from another vendor, you could just restore the whole lot from a backup and be done in hours.  (Although, that's "everything" - are you planning to take sub-sets of data, like "only these 8 projects of the 50 they have"?)