Web Services

Wiki’s ascension to the cloud.

Tap, tap– tap, tap. Does this thing still work?

Atlassian Confluence 7.4.17, affectionately known as wiki.vcu.edu is up for a change. We recognize that the Wiki is already a critical application all around VCU’s departments. Over the last few years, we’ve seen little functionalities drop as we switch Directory Services, or as a handful of CVE’s sneak up on us and force us into hiding behind RamsVPN/zScaler. For the most part, the Wiki’s usefulness has only grown, but the functionality has paradoxically shrunk.

Why the change?

To give you all the Wiki you deserve, we’ve made the brave and ostentatious decision to move our installation to THE CLOUD! There, we’ll see regular updates, enhanced security, speedier response times, and all of the other true but annoyingly trite aspects of a SaaS product. Importantly, we’ll see our Wiki accessible, again, outside of the walls of RamsVPN/zScaler.

The Wiki has been around at VCU for a decade. As you can imagine, there’s some legacy spaces and affiliated detritus lounging about our system, begging to move to the new house, similar to the old busted toys who managed to follow Buzz and Woody to Andy’s new digs. Call us Sid Phillips, because not on our watch. To keep the junk from following us to the cloud, we’re asking you all to do a bit of gardening on your end.

Mandatory Action for Space Admins and Content Editors.

We are only migrating spaces that have been edited in the last year. If your space has not been edited after December 31, 2022, it will not migrate.

If you are an admin or content editor of a space and you wish for it to migrate over to the cloud, you must make an edit of any sort within that space prior to a to-be-determined migration date. If you do not, your space will not migrate to the promised lands of Atlassian Cloud Confluence service.

Feel free to archive content you are no longer using, but this is not strictly required– it’s just a kind and thoughtful thing to do. Kindness is not required for this specific migration!

This is an extensive project and will have significant IAM implications and, frankly, changes. We are still investigating strategies to mitigate some of those changes. At this point, we know that we’ll be using Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) as our IdP, and we’re exploring what that means for our group management within Confluence. For most of you, changing over to Entra ID won’t mean a ton, aside from a different login screen than the typical CAS one.

We are also anticipating some content functionality loss as we lose support for legacy and bespoke addons that do not exist in the cloud offerings. More on that later.

As this project advances, we’ll be intermittently posting about it on this blog; we will not be sending a notification to every Wiki user. Comments have been turned on, feel free to jump in with questions and feedback.

Categories Applications, Confluence Wiki