WikiTraccs Features

WikiTraccs takes the content of each Confluence page and converts it to something SharePoint can understand.

The following sections highlight what you can expect.

Confluence Spaces

WikiTraccs maintains a space inventory containing information about all spaces in Confluence, like space title and space key.

Space information is stored in a SharePoint list. You’ll instruct WikiTraccs to update this space inventory before starting a migration. WikiTraccs then fetches space information from Confluence and adds it to the list.

You’ll use the space inventory list to select spaces to transform. You can also specify which space will go to which SharePoint site.

WikiTraccs stores information about spaces with Current and Archived state. It’s up to you to select spaces for migration. Both types can be selected.

Page Content

Macros

The Known Confluence Macros article describes how WikiTraccs handles macros.

Confluence Task Lists

Task lists are transformed to a text format containing the title of the task and the state indicated by a checkbox emoji. Nested task lists are supported.

Text Formatting

Text and basic text formatting like bold, italics, underline etc. are preserved. There are formattings that can not be reflected 1:1 in SharePoint. It ultimately depends on the capabilities of the SharePoint text web part.

SharePoint has, among others:

• limited background color support
• not as many colors available as Confluence - WikiTraccs tries to find a similar SharePoint color, when a Confluence color is not avilable
• limited nesting capabilities - e.g. you can apply formatting to whole nested sections of content in Confluence, something that SharePoint has limited support for

The source formatting also depends on the history of Confluence (versions, migrations), on the users and on the third party add-ons used. Thus it is an ongoing task to expand the capabilities of WikiTraccs here.

WikiTraccs contains hundreds of conversion rules that cover special cases observed over time and in Confluence instances with a long history.

Links in General

In Confluence you can select sections of contents, images, headings etc. and let them link to other content. In contrast to that SharePoint just allows to put a link on text or on images.

WikiTraccs tries to de-construct complex Confluence structures. A single link coming from Confluence might be split up into multiple linked text elements plus inline images with the link attached.

When de-constructing complex linked Confluence structures is not possible in a meaningful way, WikiTraccs separates the content and the link. In this case the link will be added as additional content in the SharePoint page.

Links Specific to Confluence

There are two types of links in Confluence:

• Soft links, and
• Hard links

Soft links are inserted with the link tool or from the clipboard and represent the usual way of linking within Confluence. Hard links are page addresses (URLs) copied directly into the content of a page, like text. Hard links can point to resources within Confluence as well, but also external sites.

Soft links between pages are mostly detected and converted. A link on a Confluence page pointing to another Confluence page, space, or attachment will be converted to a link to the corresponding page or file in SharePoint.

WikiTraccs covers a wide range of link types, but not all. Transforming hard links to the most recent version of a Confluence page is supported since release 1.6.4.

WikiTraccs will also transform links to other spaces. To do this it needs to know which space maps to which SharePoint site - this is done via the Space Inventory list.

Images

Images from Confluence pages are converted to image web parts in SharePoint pages.

Page Layout

Confluene Page Layouts

Yes, both Confluence and SharePoint have page layouts! WikiTraccs maps Confluence page layouts to corresponding sections in SharePoint. This works well for most of the page layouts.

There is a major drawback, though: pages in Confluence are much wider than SharePoint modern pages. SharePoint pages have a huge margin on the left and on the right. So migrated content from Confluence columns will be put into much narrower SharePoint columns. This might negatively impact the overall appearance.

Section and Column Macros, Panels

With Confluence’s section and column macros you can build arbitrarily nested structures of rows and columns. Those are a nightmare to convert to SharePoint.

WikiTraccs analyzes the sections and columns to find ways to:

1. correct and simplify the structure (users may create non-sensical, deeply nested behemoths)
2. map the macros to SharePoint tables

The result of mapping sections and columns to tables may introduce nested tables (tables within tables). And since nested tables are not supported by SharePoint, WikiTraccs will de-nest them (put them one after another).

The same applies to the panel macro - and by that matter to any other macro that is able to nest content into other content. Your mileage will vary widely with those web parts. See also the Nested macros and tables section below.

Page Metadata

The following page metadata is migrated:

• creator
• editor
• creation date
• modification date
• page labels
• source information: page id, parent page id, source space key, page title

Page Languages, Macros with MUI features

There are different products from the Atlassian marketplace available to make Confluence pages multilingual.

As of now WikiTraccs should be able to detect some of those (like Scroll Translations) and will migrate the language with the most content to SharePoint.

Making use of the SharePoint multilingual page features is surely possible, but currently not implemented.

There is an issue for that: Issue Link.

Page History

The current version of a page is migrated. No history is included.

There are currently no plans to reflect page versions in SharePoint. There are open questions from a technical standpoint regarding how page versions and attachments would be reflected in SharePoint.

Please get in touch if missing page versions are a blocker for you. In this case please think about how Confluence page versions and attachments and links to those elements would be reflected in SharePoint so that it solves your use case.

Comments & Inline Comments

WikiTraccs support the migration of footer comments. Those comments will be added as content to the bottom of migrated pages. Migration is optional and can be toggled in the settings.

Other comments like inline comments are not migrated, yet.

Feel free to chime in on this issue: Issue Link.

Drafts, Unpublished Changes and Trashed Pages

Currently none of those pages are migrated. Each page that should be migrated must be published in the clean-up phase before starting the migration.

There is an issue related to that: Issue Link.

Page Attachments and External Images

Each Confluence page attachment is migrated to SharePoint. The attachment files are stored in the Site Assets library, where a folder is created for each SharePoint page.

The main benefit of using the Site Assets library is that SharePoint mirrors any page permission changes to the folder belonging to the page. That means when breaking permission inheritance on a page the permission inheritance for the attachment folder is broken as well. This is a SharePoint out-of-the-box feature.

WikiTraccs also saves external images as page attachments in SharePoint because SharePoint does not allow image web parts to link to external domains. This is a security feature of SharePoint and makes storing those images locally necessary.

Page Permissions

Page permissions can be migrated to a certain extent. Have a look at this blog post for details: Mapping principals and migrating permissions.

Attachment Permissions

Attachment permissions in SharePoint are bound to page permissions. This is an out-of-the-box feature of SharePoint.

Attachment Metadata

Page attachments are migrated, along with the following metadata:

• Creation Time
• Created By
• Last Modified Time
• Last Modified By

WikiTraccs maps this data to the corresponding out-of-the-box SharePoint fields.

Attachment History

WikiTraccs migrates the latest version of any page attachment.

User @-mentions

SharePoint has limited support for mentions as those are currently only supported in SharePoint page comments but not the page content. Thus Confluence user mentions will be replaced by links in the SharePoint page content. Selecting this link will take the user to the SharePoint search results for the user’s email address (if the email address is known).

Jira Issue Links and Lists

If Confluence and Jira are integrated then WikiTraccs tries to get issue information like key, title and link from Jira to insert it in the SharePoint page.

For single Jira issues there will be one link per issue in the resulting SharePoint page.

The Jira issue list will be converted to a static table showing links to Jira issues. If the table had multiple pages, a snapshot of only the first page is migrated to SharePoint. So, for a query that covers 1000 issues only the first 20 or so will be shown. A link to Jira is added to the SharePoint page so you can jump to Jira to see the live issue list.

Other aggregating macros are replaced by placeholders as those macros are not supported in SharePoint.

Nested Macros and Tables

SharePoint Online modern pages are currently limited with respect to formatting and structure. Their structure is very simple and elements mostly cannot be nested.

That is the reason why certain Confluence structures have to be re-build in a non-optimal way. Let’s look at some examples.

Nesting tables is not possible in SharePoint but in Confluence. For this specific case the workaround is to de-nest those tables and put them one after another. Thus the content is preserved but the page might harder to read as a result.

The same goes for macros that contain rich content like the Expand macro, the Panel, Note-like macros and the Section and Column macros. They all allow a degree of nesting that is not possible to re-build in SharePoint.

WikiTraccs tries its best to convert those elements to something that is still legible in SharePoint. But since each source page is unique so might be the transformation needed to convert this content.

Confluence Version Support

WikiTraccs support Confluence 6, 7, and 8. Confluence 5 and older are not supported.

Content migration from Confluence Cloud seems to work, but is currently not being in active development. See a list of known issues with Confluence Cloud here: Add support for Confluence Cloud.

In any case, please use the free Trial Version of WikiTraccs to check that it works in your environment.

Target SharePoint Site vs. Subsite

WikiTraccs works with sites (site collections), not subsites. Microsoft advises agains using subsites in SharePoint Online:

Classic SharePoint architecture is typically built using a hierarchical system of site collections and subsites, with inherited navigation, permissions, and site designs. Once built, this structure can be inflexible and difficult to maintain. In the modern SharePoint experience, subsites aren’t recommended. In the new “flat” world of modern SharePoint, plan to create one site for each discrete topic, task, or unit of work. This will allow you to easily distribute management and accountability for each content collection and support your ability to move sites around in your navigational architecture without breaking links. Moreover, when a topic is no longer needed, you can easily archive or delete a site with minimal impact.