Move Your Confluence Content To A New Instance Utility

I really like Atlassian's product, and I'd like to renew to give them a vote with my dollars of confidence. I haven't taken advantage of my right to upgrade the software during the past year. If I renew the license to Bobsgear, I really should take advantage of the access to latest version of Confluence and do an upgrade. But there is a high cost in time and effort, as I outline in The high cost of supporting wiki system upgrades. It occurred to me that many others may be in a similar position, and a utility could help make the upgrade process a lot easier. Here is my proposal...

I wrote this article outlining the high costs of upgrading in addition to the renewal of my confluence license: The high cost of supporting wiki system upgrades

I then got to thinking about what might be a better approach. An approach that Atlassian might be able to use to rehabilitate some of those old licenses into buying renewals and upgrades.

I propose writing a "Move Your Confluence Content To A New Instance" utility. I think the key is doing it via the API, not the XML export/import. The steps to use it would be pretty easy:

1. Setup a new copy of the latest confluence on a new IP address (or maybe a new port on the same machine).
2. Tell the utility the location of your old confluence, and the new confluence
3. Give it the login info for an admin account on the old and new systems.
4. Check off a list of the spaces you want transferred
5. The utility uses confl-api to get the latest version of all pages and attachments from the source and transfers them to the destination. Histories, author designations, plugin data would not be transferred....
6. Test the transferred content in the new system
7. Decommission your old confluence
8. Frob settings for new confluence so it answers on the ip/port/domain name of the old confluence

This has many benefits

• the new system to be changed in major ways: Hosted on new hardware, with a new database, etc.
• It gets around all the effort needed with interim version upgrades.
• It leaves the old system untouched and usable in case the upgrade doesn't go so well. That's a HUGE benefit!

The only drawback is that version 1 of this utility:

• would not move the histories of pages or attachments.
• it would not try to move user account information
• it would not worry about attributing the moved pages to their authors

But this might be a benefit. There have been a number of requests for ways to delete revision histories for wiki pages. This utility could be thought of as cleaning things up as part of the process of moving things to the new instance. A version two of the utility could address counterfeiting the authorship and histories of articles.

Have you heard anyone expressing a wish for something that could be solved by a utility like this?

Please let me know. I'd really appreciate the encouragement of someone stepping forward to commission this utility and share in the development costs.