Plan your Cloud migration
Documents to help you prepare to migrate your Atlassian Server products.
Determine your user migration strategy
The best way to import your users and groups depends 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)
Before you begin
Read our documentation on user management in Jira Cloud and Jira Server and Data Center and what user management set up you need in cloud.
Review how users, groups, and permissions are migrated if you plan to use either the Jira or Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant to migrate.
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 and review how groups and permissions are migrated. If you have any concerns, contact support.
Migrating Jira and Confluence
If you have external directory users, you must sync external directory users to Jira or Confluence before migrating.
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 how to use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant and the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant.
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
If you have external directory users, you must first sync external directory users to Jira or Confluence before migrating.
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 |
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:
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.
Use Site Import only
Use this approach only when you are unable to use Jira Cloud Migration Assistant for user migration.
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.
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.
When using Site Import, select the Overwrite existing cloud users option when you want to erase any existing users in your Cloud site, including Confluence users. To avoid data loss, make sure back up your Cloud site before overwriting any data.
The Overwrite existing cloud users option is disabled:
when you’ve the improved user management experience or
if multiple sites, including production and sandbox sites, are managed within the same organization.
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
Learn about our recommendations to set up SCIM user provisioning during user and group migrations when you're planning to subscribe to Atlassian Access SCIM provisioning, or if SCIM is already enabled before the data migration.
Was this helpful?