For those of us in the Atlassian community, we’ve got migrations on our minds. Our in-house migration experts from Botron partnered with the author of the Jira Strategy Admin Workbook, Rachel Wright, to create The Ultimate Guide to Jira Migrations: How to Migrate from Jira Server to Data Center or Cloud. We are incredibly excited to share our resource with you! To give you a glimpse, here’s the book’s foreword from George Dinkov, co-founder and Director of Product Engineering at Botron.

Jira Migration Expertise

Since 2013, our company has focused on creating Jira apps that aid administrators with enterprise-level challenges, like system configuration, governance and scaling, backups, migrations, system integrity, and more. And through these efforts, we have become intimately familiar with the “gotchas” of Jira migration — the failure to plan and test, the lack of communication with the right stakeholders, not cleaning up before migrating to a new system, and the list goes on. We realized that a lot of administrators, and the enterprises they worked for, were facing huge obstacles when they attempted system-level changes in Jira. What the ecosystem desperately needed was a resource on Jira migrations.

Authored by Rachel Wright

Enter Rachel Wright… I personally met Rachel earlier this year, but her reputation has been well-known throughout the Atlassian ecosystem for years. Not only is Rachel a frequent speaker, user group leader, and champion within the community, she has also developed some of the best Jira training courses on LinkedIn, authored THE book on Jira strategy, and regularly offers herself as a resource to companies facing Jira administrative challenges. She has a deep understanding of Jira configurations, best practices, and how decisions today will affect the application in the future. These qualifications queue her up as the ideal author of a resource on migrations, which is why we asked her to write it.

The Migration Process

Migrations are one of the hardest things you will have to do as a Jira admin. This book is useful because it’s not just high-level guidance about migrations — it goes into the specifics about which problems are likely to be encountered, so you can plan appropriately, have the right conversations with stakeholders, think through tricky scenarios, and feel confident about each step in the migration process.

As one of the technical reviewers of this book, I can assure you that Rachel’s thought of and addressed just about every scenario one could encounter when it comes to migrating off of Jira Server. There are worksheets, case studies, a quiz, and a wealth of expert commentary that will help you make the right decisions for your own organization.

Atlassian’s Server Announcement

This book couldn’t have come at a better time, either. Although companies have been migrating and moving Jira servers for many years, Atlassian has recently announced that their Server offering is going away. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that the ecosystem comes together to share best practices, tips, and tricks for performing successful migrations.

Although you may be reading this book because of a required move, I want to assure you that regardless of the reason for moving, there is a lot of good that can come from migrating to Data Center or Cloud.

Your Jira Migration Awaits

Moving your current system is no small task, so you’ll want to make sure you clean up your instance, remove or archive old projects and issues, and only migrate what you really need. The entire process can help you gain operational efficiencies, reduce overhead, start fresh, bring in new features, reduce cruft and complexity, and improve your system infrastructure. Think of how good it will feel when the process is done, and you end up in a better spot than when you started.

I will leave you with this. If you’re faced with the mighty challenge of a Jira migration, rest easy knowing that this book covers everything you might face in the process. Read it, plan your approach, test test test, and you will save yourself a lot of headaches. So, grab a cup of coffee and settle in — the Ultimate Guide to Jira Migrations awaits!