WikiTraccs v1.6.4
Transforming Confluence “hard links”
Confluence kind of monitors links between pages. When updating the title of a page Confluence takes care of updating incoming links to this page. Those links are called soft links and should be the majority of links. When migrating Confluence pages to SharePoint WikiTraccs takes care of transforming soft links to SharePoint page links.
There is another kind of link - the hard link. Those links are plain old HTML links that Confluence is oblivious of. Technically, they appear like any other text content. And also technically, they lack important metadata that is needed to locate the target page (page ID, space key). Sometimes those links make it into a page. And as long as the target page does not change much this works, until it doesn’t and they break.
With this release WikiTraccs looks out for hard links and tries to figure out the target page. If that is successful the hard link is transformed to a proper page link in SharePoint.
There are some limits to this hard link transformation: it works only for links to pages, not attachments. And it only works for links pointing to the current page version. Hard links to older page versions cannot be converted since older page versions are not present in SharePoint. Also, the link text stays as it is - so a link might look like still pointing to the source Confluence system, yet properly links to the migrated SharePoint page.
This addition should reduce the manual post-migration labor a bit. Feedback is appreciated, either as feature proposal or discussion.