Presentation from Atlassian User Group Hamburg, 6.6.2012. Topic was migration from Mediawiki and rollout of Confluence in a complex environment with a lot of content.

1. Switching to
Confluence with
500+ Wiki users
Migrating Bigpoint from Mediawiki to
Confluence
AUGHH user group meeting, 6.6.2012,
Nils Hofmeister

2. Agenda
• Before Confluence
• The mission
• Status quo
• Learnings
2

3. Before Confluence
3

4. Before Confluence
• Time: October 2010
• Bigpoint has >500 employees
• There is a bunch of MediaWiki
instances (>50)
• Some customization
4

5. Before Confluence
5

6. Before Confluence
We had the wrong tool for the wrong people and it hurt. But barely anybody was
aware…
Fortunately there were a couple of people interested in replacing our Wiki by
Confluence.
6

7. Before Confluence
To justify the costs, we used the following arguments:
• Global search
• Spaces
• Role-based permissions
• Connection to Jira
• Versioning + concurrency handling
• All the plugins
• Migration via UWC
In late 2010, we got approval.
The fight for resources started…
7

8. The mission
8

9. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
9

10. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
•
•
•
•
Have everything in SVN
Wrap Tomcat daemon so it works with monitoring, Ops automation etc
Use configuration templates for modified files
Setup a staging system
10

11. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
•
•
•
•
Have everything in SVN
Wrap Tomcat daemon so it works with monitoring, Ops automation etc
Use configuration templates for modified files
Setup a staging system
• Who maintains it?
11

12. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
•
•
•
•
Have everything in SVN
Wrap Tomcat daemon so it works with monitoring, Ops automation etc
Use configuration templates for modified files
Setup a staging system
• Who maintains it?
• My team (Release Engineering)
• Right combination of skills and focus, but still…
12

13. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
•
•
•
•
Have everything in SVN
Wrap Tomcat daemon so it works with monitoring, Ops automation etc
Use configuration templates for modified files
Setup a staging system
• Who maintains it?
• My team (Release Engineering)
• Right combination of skills and focus, but still…
• How exactly will migration happen?
13

14. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
•
•
•
•
Have everything in SVN
Wrap Tomcat daemon so it works with monitoring, Ops automation etc
Use configuration templates for modified files
Setup a staging system
• Who maintains it?
• My team (Release Engineering)
• Right combination of skills and focus, but still…
• How exactly will migration happen?
•
•
•
•
First sample spaces as example
New “units” go directly to Confluence
Migrate Teams step by step using UWC
=> Soft migration
14

15. The mission
Open questions
• How to integrate with Bigpoint IT platform?
•
•
•
•
Have everything in SVN
Wrap Tomcat daemon so it works with monitoring, Ops automation etc
Use configuration templates for modified files
Setup a staging system
• Who maintains it?
• My team (Release Engineering)
• Right combination of skills and focus, but still…
• How exactly will migration happen?
•
•
•
•
First sample spaces as example
New “units” go directly to Confluence
Migrate Teams step by step using UWC
=> Soft migration
• What about Kerberos SSO and AD?
15

16. The mission
Kerberos
• Not easy to grasp
• Hard to deal with when you are not admin
• Gave us a lot of trouble in Java context
So we used an already existing in-house service:
Behold… LoginProxy!
16

17. The mission
17

18. The mission
Integration
• We had a first RC ready in April 2011
• It used LoginProxy for authentication
• It used a cronjob + SOAP for AD sync / authorization
• We had two blades in place for staging + production:
• 2x Quad core, 12 GB RAM, 2x 320 GB HDD, SATA, JBOD
• Backup etc via Bigpoint standard mechanisms
• Took about 5 man weeks to get everything ready and test it
• Central technology teams started using it
• Administration was cooperation of Release Engineering + IT Engineering
18

19. The mission
Migration
• No interruption of ongoing projects
• Long migration timeframe (>6 months)
• Lack of acceptance with some users
• UWC results very mixed
• => More users started noticing Confluence…
• Thank god we had a tech writer who could assist with content, support and
training
19

20. The mission
Migration
• Tracking of wiki migration using Jira
• Conversion respecting stakeholder schedules
• Mediawikis still exist, but read-only
• A lot of training
•
•
•
•
•
•
Brown bag meetings
Coaching per group
Update meetings
Confluence space
Examples
…
20

21. The mission
Result: Success
Specs, 06/2012 (14 month later):
• 971 users
• 152 groups
• 152 spaces (without personal)
• 19.493 pages created
• 34.091 attachments uploaded
“You can find our current documentation in Confluence”
-Random Bigpoint employee
21

22. Status quo
22

23. Status quo
• In use worldwide
• E.g. Hamburg, Berlin, Malta, San Francisco
• Confluence 3.5.13
• Balsamiq
• Gliffy
• So far 2 custom plugins in development
• Custom Jira issue creator
• Custom AD synchronizer
• Integration with
• Jira
• Issues macros, shortcut links
• Application link
• Jenkins
• Internal middleware (e.g. mailtool)
23

24. Status quo
24

25. Status quo
Next big tasks
25

26. Status quo
Next big tasks
• Confluence 4
• Delayed to avoid shocking our users with 2 major changes within 1 year
• Mixed feelings: markup power users, APIs, coaching,…
26

27. Status quo
Next big tasks
• Confluence 4
• Delayed to avoid shocking our users with 2 major changes within 1 year
• Mixed feelings: markup power users, APIs, coaching,…
• Better Kerberos Integration
• Avoid trouble with cached passwords vs. tool integration
• Reduces maintenance efforts and reliability
27

28. Learnings
28

29. Learnings
Acceptance
• In general, acceptance was given quickly since
• Confluence is fancy
• Brings a lot of features
• Integrates with Jira nicely
29

30. Learnings
Acceptance
• In general, acceptance was given quickly since
• Confluence is fancy
• Brings a lot of features
• Integrates with Jira nicely
• Maybe a hard migration would have been easier…
• …but we would have had far more haters
30

31. Learnings
Acceptance
• In general, acceptance was given quickly since
• Confluence is fancy
• Brings a lot of features
• Integrates with Jira nicely
• Maybe a hard migration would have been easier…
• …but we would have had far more haters
• Remaining haters could be convinced by
• Dedicated trainings + support
• New features (e.g. heatmap, role-based security,…)
• Fast reactions – when we started: immediate changes
31

32. Learnings
Acceptance
• In general, acceptance was given quickly since
• Confluence is fancy
• Brings a lot of features
• Integrates with Jira nicely
• Maybe a hard migration would have been easier…
• …but we would have had far more haters
• Remaining haters could be convinced by
• Dedicated trainings + support
• New features (e.g. heatmap, role-based security,…)
• Fast reactions – when we started immediate changes
Conclusion: when the field isn’t green, only soft migration
works
32

33. Learnings
Costs
• When we started about 1,5 persons permanently working on Confluence intro
33

34. Learnings
Costs
• When we started about 1,5 persons permanently working on Confluence intro
• System integration was much more expensive than expected
34

35. Learnings
Costs
• When we started about 1,5 persons permanently working on Confluence intro
• System integration was much more expensive than expected
• Right now, work on demand
•
•
•
•
•
Bug fixes
Plugin development
Coaching of new people
Changes and extensions
Standardization
• Basically, 1-2 persons are permanently working on Confluence one way or the
other
35

36. Learnings
Costs
• When we started about 1,5 persons permanently working on Confluence intro
• System integration was much more expensive than expected
• Right now, work on demand
•
•
•
•
•
Bug fixes
Plugin development
Coaching of new people
Changes and extensions
Standardization
• Basically, 1-2 persons are permanently working on Confluence one way or the
other
Conclusion: 2 fulltime persons needed for a Confluence of our
size and usage scenario: a DevOps guy and a workflow person
36

37. Learnings
Enterprisy requirements
• Authentication and authorization requires customization
37

38. Learnings
Enterprisy requirements
• Authentication and authorization requires customization
• Certain IT requirements hard to address
• Replication
• Failover
• Automated deployment
38

39. Learnings
Enterprisy requirements
• Authentication and authorization requires customization
• Certain IT requirements hard to address
• Replication
• Failover
• Automated deployment
• Some features are not yet convenient enough
•
•
•
•
•
Bulk attachment upload
Easy update of attachments (e.g. excel files)
Default groups for new users
Notification email templates
…
39

40. Learnings
Enterprisy requirements
• Authentication and authorization requires customization
• Certain IT requirements hard to address
• Replication
• Failover
• Automated deployment
• Some features are not yet convenient enough
•
•
•
•
•
Bulk attachment upload
Easy update of attachments (e.g. excel files)
Default groups for new users
Notification email templates
…
Conclusion: If you want to customize Confluence significantly,
you will need admin and Java dev skills.
40

41. Summary
41

42. Summary
•The good
• Soft migration via UWC worked for us
• Users were happy quickly
• The possibilities are awesome
•The bad
• The frontend is fancy, maintenance can be weird
•The ugly
• It costs quite some manpower for serious operation
• It needs continuous effort for acceptance
• You need skilled, hard to find people for this
42

43. Summary
If you want to operate a serious Confluence instance, you
need manpower.
But you get the best possible documentation system I know.
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44. Contact us
Bigpoint GmbH
Nils Hofmeister
Lead Integration Architect
Drehbahn 47-48
20354 Hamburg
Germany
Tel +49 40.88 14 13 - 0
Fax +49 40.88 14 13 - 11
nhofmeister@bigpoint.net
www.bigpoint.net
Bigpoint Inc.
Bigpoint Distribuição de
Entretenimento Online Ltda.
500 Howard Street
Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94105
Av. Brig. Faria Lima
3729 cj. 528
04538-905 São Paulo
Brazil
Bigpoint GmbH
Bigpoint International Services
Limited
Alexanderstraße 5
10178 Berlin
Germany
1 Villa Zimmermann
Ta’Xbiex Terrace
XBX 1035 Ta’Xbiex
Malta
Find us on
44

45. Bigpoint GmbH
First name, last name
Title
Drehbahn 47-48
20354 Hamburg
Germany
Tel +49 40.88 14 13 - 0
Fax +49 40.88 14 13 - 11
info@bigpoint.net
www.bigpoint.net
Find us on
45