Introducing non technical people to the world of wikis got a whole lot easier with the online trial version of Confluence and the release of Confluence Hosted earlier this year. It enabled our customers to get started without the hurdles of installing a web-based application on their own servers. The uptake was great and we had quite a few customers wanting to grow Confluence internally and switch to a Standalone version. However, migrating spaces was a tedious process because it had to be done one by one, and migrating users and groups was not even possible.

Also if you have multiple instances of Confluence running within your company you might want to move a space or a group of users from one instance to another. There was no easy way to perform this task. Until now.

What can the plugin do for me?

The Remote Import Plugin for Confluence solves those problems. Migrate your data from our Hosted Service into your Standalone Confluence instance, or move a space from one instance to another. Easily done with a few simple steps:

• Specify the remote server and login details
• Choose the type of content you want to import
• Click the import button

Done, a progress bar will indicate how long the import will take. The plugin is accessible via the global administration and supports migrating the following types of data:

• Space: a single space
• Space Group: a number of spaces within a space group (used in Confluence Hosted)
• User Group: a single user group
• User Groups: all groups starting with the specified key. Eg. the key "sales" will retrieve all groups starting with the word “salesâ€? such as sales-interal and sales-external

Please note that the plugin is a beta release. We will need to do some further testing and minor tweaks before 1.0. The plugin has to be installed on both, the remote and local instance of Confluence. For more details, please see the plugin documentation. A last note, migrating spaces may take a long time depending on the number of attachments and the size of the space, please be aware of that when migrating your data.

Also if you have multiple instances of Confluence running within your company you might want to move a space or a group of users from one instance to another. There was no easy way to perform this task. Until now.