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"Do you migrate to Atlassian?" is a series of articles focusing on a typical customer project: migrating data and business logic from any kind of 3^rd party solutions into the Atlassian ecosystem. The reasons and the source systems can be various that is why we try to collect as many real customer stories as possible. Stay tuned, maybe once a day during a migration project you will have a much easier and happier day thanks to tips&tricks we share here.

• About the source systems
• Reason of change
• Migration process
• Difficulties and solutions
• Many project to one
• Disabled users
• Multi user picker custom field migration error
• Update your Redmine and addons
• Lessons learned

About the source systems

„Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using the Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.”

Reason of change

Our customer has already used Confluence for their internal knowledge base and document store. The integration opportunity of JIRA and Confluence was a good selling point, but the main reasons were the enhanced functionality and flexibility.

They found their old, Redmine-based system uncomfortable in the following aspects:

• needed a sophisticated permission settings
• which is easy to configure in JIRA with permission and security schemes
• wanted to use e-mail for collaboratation for tasks
• JIRA Email This Issue (JETI) is a powerful JIRA addon that fulfills every requirements of the customer
• their monthly reward system was based on the reported working hours so needed deep worklog analysis and overview
• with JIRA Timesheet and Reports Gadget and the Tempo product family we introduced new working processes that perfectly met with their needs

Migration process

Most of the migration process was done in 6 super easy steps, as JIRA Importers Plugin (known as JIM as well) with JIRA Redmine Importer plugin were powerful tools with a handy user interface. (Due to privacy reasons we used only sample pictures below)

1. Connection settings
   

1. Projects mapping
   

1. Custom field settings
   

1. Field settings
   

1. Values settings
   

1. Issue links settings
   

Difficulties and solutions

Many project to one

Our customer used a lot different projects in the Redmine, but they decided to move all of the issues into only one project after the migration. Hopefully the "destination project" option makes this change very easy.

Disabled users

During the test migration we found some interesting log entry like this

2015-08-05 10:14:27,489 WARN - Commenter named l***a.o***z not found. Creating issue with currently logged in user instead

After a small research we found the reason: the user was disabled in the Redmine. Enabling for the export phase was a quick solution.

JIM (JIRA Importers Plugin) log entries provide very detailed and helpful information, so this is one of the strongest part of the addon (see the example below).

First test migration

2015-08-05 12:56:29,826 INFO - Import started by admin using com.atlassian.jira.plugins.importer.redmine.RedmineDataBean

2015-08-05 12:56:29,850 INFO - ------------------------------

2015-08-05 12:56:29,850 INFO - Importing: Users

2015-08-05 12:56:29,850 INFO - ------------------------------

2015-08-05 12:56:29,850 INFO - Only new items will be imported

….

2015-08-05 12:59:00,807 INFO - 48 users associated with import. 47 new users were created and imported as active.

2015-08-05 12:59:00,807 INFO - ------------------------------

2015-08-05 12:59:00,807 INFO - Finished Importing : Users

2015-08-05 12:59:00,807 INFO - ------------------------------

Try an another export without deleting previously migrated users (testing just the data side)

2015-08-06 16:08:09,563 INFO - Import started by admin using com.atlassian.jira.plugins.importer.redmine.RedmineDataBean

2015-08-06 16:08:09,573 INFO - ------------------------------

2015-08-06 16:08:09,573 INFO - Importing: Users

2015-08-06 16:08:09,573 INFO - ------------------------------

2015-08-06 16:08:09,573 INFO - Only new items will be imported

2015-08-06 16:09:54,264 INFO - 48 users associated with import. 0 new users were created and imported as active.

2015-08-06 16:09:54,264 INFO - ------------------------------

2015-08-06 16:09:54,264 INFO - Finished Importing : Users

2015-08-06 16:09:54,264 INFO - ------------------------------

Multi user picker custom field migration error

There was a multi user picker field in Redmine called “Participants” for some issues. Unfortunately, instead of user names or ID-s we always got just unmatchable ID-s during the test migration. We reported this bug to Atlassian but they couldn’t reproduce the error. Due to internal security rules our customer didn't allow Atlassians to enter into their system for bug tracking. So we had to correct these issues by hand after the migration

Update your Redmine and addons

As described in the documentation before starting the migration process ensure that both Redmine, and import addons are not too old versions

• Minimum Redmine versions supported are 1.3.0+ and 2.0+.
• Make sure that you are using version 5.0.2 or later of the JIRA Importers Plugin.
• Enable the REST web service in Redmine in Administration > Settings > Authentication > Enable REST webservice, if you haven't already enabled it.

First time we forgot it, so we can prove that JIM really will not work with old version of Redmine, we had to upgrade it before its final shut down :)

Lessons learned

• Great log information – error resolution is much more easy after reading the migration logs
• Most of the original data can be migrated in a step-by-step procedure, so do not be afraid of the migration
• Not only Redmine migration is so easy (Trac, Rally, Asana, Bugzilla, etc are supported), see the opportunities here

More details

If you are interested you can view a short video summary about this customer story (unfortunately only in Hungarian) recorded in the 2^ndHungarian Atlassian Meetup.