Data migration into Confluence 4.0 from a CMS - can this work?

[Kim Seav]

Hi,

We are looking towards using Confluence as the system behind our intranet. Being a telco, we have around 400 pages of help articles that we need moved into Confluence from RightNow so I'm wondering if there any partial automation options available.

I understand there would still be much manual human involvement but since we have so much content to migrate over, any time saved from importing would be handy.

Now before asking this question I have looked around for information on migrating content but there doesn't seem much around about migration from other systems outside of Atlassian. Found this article, http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Importing+Content+Into+Confluence, the content converter plugin sounded promising until I saw that the plugin is no longer being developed/supported.

Main questions I have are:

1. What file types do Confluence accept for import? Would a csv do? How can this then be manipulated so that it is accepted by Confluence's data structure?

2. Do you have a plugin which can assist with data compare?

3. How much of a structure do we need to set up in Confluence so that it is line with what's in the data we are importing?

4. Is there anyway meta data can be retained and matched to the fields in Confluence at all? How do you do this?

5. Is there anyway to preserve existing styles and attachments on a page?

Sorry for all the questions, any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers

Kim

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

I usually start with the UWC - https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/wiki/display/UWC/Universal+Wiki+Converter - it can make a lot of conversion easy, preserving a lot of metadata and structure automatically. It always needs some help and guidance from a human, as it's rare to get an ideal match, but it's worth a look. I don't think it can read RightNow directly, but it might be close enough.

If it's not close enough, then Bob's CLI is the way forward.

[Kim Seav]

Thanks Nic. I checked out the UWC plugin but it seems it only compatible with wikis: https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/wiki/display/UWC/UWC+Supported+Wikis

:(

[Bob Swift]

Confluence Command Line Interface is a way to automate adding content to Confluence.

[Kim Seav]

Thanks Bob. I've been looking into the CCLI but I'm a bit confused as to where the data source is coming from? Before using SOAP to get the data, I presume the data needs to be in a predefined format so it can be read properly so that the transfers can occur. What format should this data be in? We are trying to find out what outputs Right Now (not as structured as from wiki to wiki) can provide for us but on the other end, what does it need to specifically be for this to work? Sorry if I'm getting this all wrong...appreciate your help

Cheers

Kim

[Bob Swift]

You first need to determine what data you want out of Right Now and how to get it out. Then you need to figure where it goes in Confluence. Itis pretty much going to have to be pages of simple text and attachments. The CLI only helps you put the data into Confluence pages or attachments.