Question on migrating spaces between two different confluence instances

[Lionel Moore]

I will be attempting to export multiple spaces from one Confluence instance and importing them into a different Confluence instance. Both instances will have the same OS and confluence version (4.3.2), however the target has pre-existing spaces that can't be overwritten and the target has a different user management. The source Confluence uses the built-in user management, and the destination Confluence uses LDAP (POSIX user schema). Some of the source usernames are the same as the LDAP usernames. Some of the source usernames have equivalent LDAP usernames (for example Han.Solo in Source Confluence might be the same person as soloh in LDAP). Other source usernames are role users (e.g. qa-engineers) which we won't be allowed to create in LDAP.

We are working with the idea that we could do an XML export, then use sed to search and replace the equivalent usernames. Is this feasible? What happens with usernames that can't exist in the new system? Also, none of the user groups from the Source instance will be created on the destination instance. Will that be a problem?

[Bruna Griebeler]

We are working with the idea that we could do an XML export, then use sed to search and replace the equivalent usernames. Is this feasible?

Yes!

What happens with usernames that can't exist in the new system?

If you import a space wich creator doesn't exist, the user will not be created. However if only this user is restricted to see and or edit a page, it will be unacessible.

So I suggest your first approach to change all the usernames to another username (that exists in your Confluence).

You can, as an example, create an a test user and put all on his behaf.

Hope it helps!