Plan your Cloud migration
Documents to help you prepare to migrate your Atlassian Server products.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Number of users | User directory | Method for data migration | Recommended method for user migration |
---|---|---|---|
Less than 1000 users | External/ Internal/Both | Jira Cloud Migration Assistant | Jira Cloud Migration Assistant |
More than 1000 users | External/ Internal/Both | Site Import | Jira Cloud Migration Assistant |
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.
Perform these steps:
Migrate users and groups using the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant
Migrate the rest of your data using Site Import
When using Site Import to migrate data, select the option I've migrated user data using the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant on the Import Jira Server page. Learn more about using Site Import to migrate
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.
User migration options are no longer available
We’ve discontinued user migration options for Server to Cloud migrations using Site Import:
Merge with existing cloud users
Overwrite existing cloud users
Use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate users. Learn how to migrate users and groups with Jira Cloud Migration Assistant
For any technical concerns with this change, contact us.
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.
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.
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
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