Six tips for moving away from Atlassian Server

1. Plan your timeline

The good news is that Atlassian gave us three and a quarter years of notice, this is plenty of time, so there’s no need to panic. Being practical, and assuming you don’t want to run software without support, Summer to Winter 2023 is probably the final window for large migrations. If you are a young couple with only a little furniture, then you can move a lot quicker to take advantage of some of the new cloud features pretty much straight away.

2. Get to know your new neighbourhood

Atlassian Cloud is quite different from the Server edition in that it has new navigation and features, user management is different, and so on. Spend some time getting to know this new platform by creating a free instance for yourself.

The Data Center edition is also quite different in terms of deploying, upgrading, and managing, so take your time preparing the deployment of this platform as well.

3. Wait for the right property to come along

Atlassian Cloud might not have the same features as your current instance, Marketplace apps, for example, might not be as mature in features, this will change rapidly after the recent news, but you may need to wait a little while before essential features become available.

Consult the Atlassian Cloud Roadmap: click here to find out more, and keep an eye on it, as it will be regularly updated by Atlassian. Contact your Marketplace app vendors as well to find out what their Cloud roadmap looks like.

4. Don’t buy any new furniture that might not match

This is a policy you can put into place right away, please don’t buy any new Marketplace apps or do any new integrations that are not Cloud compatible, or where it might not be possible to migrate the data to the Cloud in the future.

5. Declutter

Packing up the removal van will be a lot less work if you have already decluttered your instance, removed all of those unused test projects, custom fields and disabled Marketplace apps, etc. The decluttering process can take many months, so make some time to start working on this now, it will save a lot of effort in the long-run.

6. Check the furniture matches your new home

I’m talking about bespoke plug-ins and scripting here — the more technically complex instances. It’s quite likely that these integrations will not work in Atlassian Cloud, so the country manor (Data Center) might be the right choice of destination for you. Alternatively, start planning a transition of these scripts to the Cloud, get familiar with Automation for Jira, Atlassian’s no-code tool, and other scripting capabilities of Cloud products.