Why Migrating Content from Confluence to SharePoint Could Be Harmful

From Enterprise Collaboration

Just Google “enterprise collaboration” and you’re likely to come across various tools designed to increase integration and innovation in the digital workplace.

Of these numerous tools, two that are favored by many Fortune 100 companies are SharePoint and Confluence.

While the former amazes enterprises with its workflow capabilities and powerful document management, the latter simplifies documentation and knowledge sharing via its flexible and robust wiki capabilities.

Both platforms, on their own, strengthen enterprise collaboration by unifying business processes and democratizing knowledge.

To Enterprise Chaos

Ironically, when these platforms are used together, they become competing systems. Collaboration turns into chaos.

Separate platforms give rise to siloed information and systems; ultimately, hurting productivity.

Operating multiple platforms is also costly. And to a CFO, since both platforms appear to do the same thing, paying for both can seem wasteful.

Why Migrating Content from Confluence to SharePoint May Hurt Your Business

These pitfalls are enough to consider migrating users and content from Confluence to SharePoint, the usual official corporate platform.

Add in the mounting pressure from management to consolidate users into a single, cost-efficient platform and you’re now on your way to disposing of Confluence altogether.

But migrating content from Confluence to SharePoint comes with risks that may hurt your business:

Confluence as an Innovation Investment 

Confluence is not just a temporary wiki space for you to collect employee knowledge. It’s an innovation investment that can boost your company’s efficiency.

The Atlassian technology stack – integrating Confluence with other Atlassian products like Jira – provides for a seamless workflow and improved productivity. That’s why many of the most innovative companies like Spotify, Docker, and Lufthansa have integrated their Jira with Confluence.

With Confluence, enterprise-wide activities become transparent and information silos between different teams are broken down. Most importantly, it provides a single source of information, thereby easing communication between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

So, if you do away with Confluence altogether and migrate all your content to SharePoint, your company may miss out on these important benefits.

Time-Consuming Process

Migrating content from Confluence to SharePoint is time-consuming.  Even with convenient migration tools, preparation steps like backing-up content and testing system readiness are crucial and, of course, tedious.

In fact, a community of data migration specialists – Data Migration Pro – prepared a 7 phase planner to systemize data migration. Missing even one small step in your pre- and post-migration process can derail your workflow and waste precious time.

And as experienced system admins know, even with the best migration tools and adequate preparation, there’s still a big risk of errors like broken links and corrupted page formatting. This risk is amplified if your enterprise is large and possesses a vast amount of content.

Should your team encounter these errors after migration, you’d require a lot of IT man-hours fixing them; something that you can’t easily spare.

Low User Adoption

One of the biggest challenges with a migration is getting your teams to adopt the new software. Change resistance is real, and if you’re not prepared to deal with it, you may find your teams reverting to bad habits like emailing documents, storing files on hard drives, and other uncollaborative practices.

Imagine being familiar and comfortable using a software to complete daily tasks only to have it suddenly changed. Now, imagine that the old software was Confluence, with its lightweight and intuitive interface, and the new software is SharePoint, with its notoriously steep learning curve.

It’s no wonder that many migration projects struggle at this critical step.

Teams grapple with learning to use the new software while simultaneously completing their daily tasks. They can quickly become frustrated with the sudden and steep learning curve, resulting in both low user adoption and reduced workplace productivity.

Interrupted Workflows

Confluence is the choice of collaborative wiki space for many companies that are already using Jira.

Since both software are part of the Atlassian ecosystem, this directly translates to seamless integration between Jira and Confluence.

For example, you can easily use the information in Jira to create a Change Log or Status Report on Confluence. Presenting your team’s project progress to stakeholders has never been easier.

So, migrating content from Confluence to SharePoint will interrupt your team’s usual workflow and potentially hurt your business.

The Solution Is Integrating Content Between Confluence and SharePoint

Instead of migrating content, many organizations are better off integrating Confluence and SharePoint.

Integrating content between the two platforms ensures that you get the best of enterprise knowledge sharing and document management.

Not only will your teams be able to collaborate freely using their preferred platform, but information is also embedded across both platforms.

This is exactly what our app provides. With SharePoint Connector for Confluence, there’s no need to migrate content from Confluence to SharePoint.

Simply embed spaces, pages, and blog posts from Confluence in SharePoint. Team members can easily share the latest project developments and news from Confluence to other teams that are using SharePoint.