Determine your user migration strategy

When planning your overall migration, it’s important to decide when and how you will migrate users. This will depend on:

• the products you’re migrating

• whether you have users from external directories

• the migration method you’re using

• if you plan to use Atlassian Access for SCIM user provisioning

We recommend taking the time to learn how user management works in cloud, and make a detailed plan of the tasks you’ll need to complete to migrate your user accounts. We recommend you think holistically about your cloud organization, and how changes to someone’s Atlassian account can affect all cloud products they have access to, not just those managed by your team.

Before you begin

• Learn about the differences between managing users in server, and cloud and decide which setup you need. User management differences in Cloud and Server

• Determine whether you need Atlassian access. Will my organization need Atlassian Access?

• Learn about how users, groups and permissions are migrated using the Migration Assistants. How are users, groups and permissions migrated?

• Check which user management experience your organization has. From your organization at admin.atlassian.com, if the Users list and Groups list are under the Directory tab, you have the improved user management experience. This means the users and groups across sites will be merged under the organization. Learn more about the improved user management experience that may affect your migration experience.

Migrating Jira and Confluence

We recommend you migrate users before migrating data and use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant. Migrating users first helps you save time. When you migrate data after migrating users, the Migration Assistant won’t re-migrate those users but will link space or project data to the email addresses in the cloud. If you’re migrating in phases, every migration after the first one will be much faster.

In the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant, when you select Users related to selected spaces, groups aren’t migrated. Only users who have commented on the page, created pages inside the space, have permissions to access the space, and users who are mentioned on the page are migrated. These users will be added to your cloud site, however, they will not have product access.

For Jira Service Management, the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant can migrate customer accounts related to selected projects, or migrate all customer accounts without any project data.

Learn more about using Jira and Confluence migration assistants:

• Use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate

• Use Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate (legacy)

Migrating Jira

If you’re migrating only Jira, your user migration strategy will depend on:

• the number of users you’re migrating

• whether you have internal or external directories such as LDAP, ADFS, or Crowd

Use this table to see the method we recommend to migrate users.

Use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant only

We recommend you migrate your users and then migrate all other data.

You can use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant to:

• migrate users related to the projects you select to migrate, or

• migrate users from active internal and external directories without any project data.

Use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and Site Import

Perform these steps:

1. Migrate users and groups using the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant

2. Migrate the rest of your data using Site Import

After the migration is complete:

• For users who migrated using the migration assistant, their usernames are updated with the usernames in the entities.xml backup file.

• If new users are in the entities.xml backup file, these users will be migrated to the cloud site with the usernames in the backup file.

• If any user is deleted from the backup file, they will appear as ‘Former user’ in the Jira cloud site.

Use Site Import only

Jira Site Import migrates only users managed in the Jira Server and Data Center internal directory. However, external directory users will still be part of the backup. If you have an external directory, migrate users from the external directory to the Jira internal user directory.

Learn more about using Jira Site Import

Learn more about migrating users to the Jira internal user directory

If your server has an internal directory and an inactive external directory with duplicate users, site import may fail. We recommend manually deleting duplicate users from the inactive external directory before using Site Import. These deleted users will still be migrated and will appear as ‘Former user’ after migration.

Post-migration tasks

The Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and the Jira Site Import create a new Atlassian account for each user and associate them with your cloud site. They will not be assigned a password, so your users must reset their password the first time they sign in. Users' history and the content will be linked to their new Atlassian account.

Atlassian Access recommendations

If you plan to subscribe to Atlassian Access for SCIM user provisioning, or if SCIM user provisioning is already enabled in your cloud organization, check our recommendations about SCIM user provisioning during user and group migrations.

Learn how SCIM user provisioning will affect your migration