As part of the Atlassian’s ongoing process to focus on their cloud platform, on February 2, 2021, the company will stop selling new server licenses and increase the price of maintenance for existing server renewals and upgrades. So, what are your options?
Atlassian continues to invest heavily in the cloud and more server-based customers are making the switch every day. However, some of you might want to stay in an on-premise environment or move to a new cloud environment. Tzunami is here to help you make your decision and develop a migration plan based on your requirements. This article will cover the process of the end of sale and support for Confluence Server.
What does Confluence Server end of support mean for your organization?
First, Atlassian will continue to provide support (i.e. database, browser, Java) and bug fixes on server products during this year. Following February 2, 2022, the company will only provide security bug-fixes for critical vulnerabilities until the end of support.
Server customers will have access to maintenance and support for an additional three years, ending February 2, 2024. Meanwhile, Atlassian offers Data Center, which is self-managed enterprise edition, but the costs almost doubles for similar products. Furthermore, there is a huge difference – you can never “own” current data center. As soon as you stop paying, you can’t use your software. For those of you that use Jira and Confluence to manage process and communication across your organization this is really important issue.
There are three main options for you as the end of life for Atlassian Confluence Server:
Confluence Cloud
If moving to the cloud is an option, you can just migrate all your data to Confluence Cloud. However, Confluence Cloud may be more expensive than your server-based version. In addition to that you need to know that many plugins that you are already use, can only work with their on-prem API. Furthermore, if you felt that Confluence on-prem working as good as in Microsoft Word, it was because it has a desktop application experience. While working in Confluence cloud you have to wait between every action you take.
Move to other cloud storage for example: Confluence to Office 365
For anyone who is looking for an alternative, many users find Microsoft as a very comfortable destination. In recent years some of Atlassian’s customers migrated from Confluence cloud to Office 365. If you were using Confluence as a document solution, you will get also all the benefits of Office 365 collaborative Microsoft Suite in one platform.
Both – Confluence & SharePoint seem to offer some of the features that you would expect with enterprise collaboration software. Migrate from Confluence to SharePoint online is so easy today because it’s widely used and relatively easy to learn how to use SharePoint if you’ve never been exposed to it before.
Migrate to other On Premise system such as Confluence to SharePoint 2019
Relevant for many Confluence server users to whom migrating to the cloud is not an option. Governmental institutions for example still have some strict regulations and security requierments in place which won’t change despite huge transition into the cloud.
Many others just want to keep their data on self-hosted servers. Recently we experienced growing interest for migrating Confluence server to SharePoint 2019 following this change. SharePoint simply does more than Confluence. The biggest differentiator is that SharePoint works seamlessly with other Microsoft products. Enterprise organizations, businesses that are already invested in Microsoft’s ecosystem, should consider transfer their Confluence data to SharePoint 2019.
How to migrate from Confluence to SharePoint?
We know that migrating from Confluence to SharePoint is an intensive decision such as relocating to a different country. That’s why you need to search for a third party migration software. A migration solution that enables the complete preservation of metadata and prevent losing data. For example, using Tzunami Deployer’s security mappings, clients can perform the migration of users, groups (and groups membership) permissions and custom access level even across Active Directory domains and many more.
With Tzunami Deployer in just 4 easy steps you can migrate from Confluence to SharePoint 2019 or Confluence to Office 365:
- Export extraction of your Confluence server including metadata using Tzunami Exporter.
- Load exported Confluence data into Deployer & read your target SharePoint.
- Deploy with all needed configurations (easy Drag and Drop).
- Migrate the data into your new SharePoint environment.
So, what’s next?
First, you need to understand your business needs and your budget for the process. Then, you need to analyze your data and search for problematic items. Tzunami has a Pre-migration analysis to avoid any surprises during the migration process. After you prepare the migration plan start your migration with your desired tool.
On February 2, 2024, your products will reach end of support. After that date, Atlassian will not release any further product updates. Regular security updates help protect your business from threats and vulnerabilities, so we strongly recommend that you plan to upgrade your JIRA environment and migrating to cloud or migrate your Confluence server to SharePoint 2019 on premise before the end of support date.
If you have specific questions or you would like to hear more, please feel free to contact us.
