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Confluence Cloud Specialties

This post explains how certain content can only be migrated using workarounds and also lists the prerequisites for those workarounds to work.
By Heinrich Ulbricht |

To migrate content from Confluence Cloud to SharePoint Online, WikiTraccs needs to access content in Confluence Cloud to download it. Content means page content, attachments, metadata, macro details, new content types like whiteboards, and more.

There are two ways to get content from Confluence Cloud: using a programming interface that is officially supported by Atlassian, and using internal interfaces.

Ideally, only officially supported interfaces are used; for Confluence Cloud, that would be the REST API.

Since this post exists, you might already guess where this is leading. Not every content is accessible using official ways.

Content that can only be migrated via workarounds

There are Confluence elements which cannot be accessed using officially documented interfaces (as the Confluence Cloud REST API would be one).

WikiTraccs tries to work around those limitations.

Here’s the list of (currently known) elements that need a workaround to be migrated:

  1. Jira issue lists
  2. Whiteboards

Let’s look at each of those.

Jira issue lists

WikiTraccs takes static snapshots of Jira issue lists so that the migrated SharePoint page contains a static issue table as well.

In Confluence Cloud the endpoint to do that conversion is not officially accessible (WikiTraccs issue #123).

WikiTraccs works around this limitation by using the same endpoint that Confluence uses when you work in the browser.

Prerequisite: This workaround is only available to WikiTraccs when using Interactive Login. It is not supported when using API tokens or Anonymous access.

Whiteboards

Read this blog post to learn how WikiTraccs works around the missing Confluence Cloud export functionality at the ramifications: Migrating Confluence Cloud Whiteboards

Closing notes

WikiTraccs uses workarounds to migrate content that otherwise is not accessible to apps via official Atlassian interfaces.

Those workarounds are based on internal interfaces and they might break at any time since Atlassian is not required to announce changes. So, it might happen that a workaround stops working temporarily, might require a WikiTraccs update, or might stop working at all. There is nothing that can be done about that, apart from lobbying for Atlassian to provide proper interfaces for exporting all content.

WikiTraccs uses workarounds exclusively for content that otherwise would not be accessible at all and would thus be missing in migrated pages.