User migration from one instance to another.

[Dave Hattig]

Hi, My company was acquired by another company and now we are looking at merging our two instances of Jira. Any advice or location of a project plan would be very nice if anyone has one. And anything that sticks out when merging we should be careful with?

Another question we had, is what happens to the users who are in one instance company A, and they move to company B's instance without being setup in company B's domain? Will they and their information come over as an unknown user alias? Or how does that work?

Thanks in advance for any help!!

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, there is no magical "merge button." This is a pretty messy operation where all of the options likely require a lot of work.

Assuming you really want to do what you are proposing, probably the easiest thing to do would be to "Backup" the acquired company's Cloud instance and restore it to a Data Center instance, normalize the users, Fields, Resolutions, etc (the stuff that would potentially be duplicated) and then use JCMA to migrate the Projects you care about to your existing Cloud instance. Note that I said "probably." More details can be found in Atlassian's docs.

Atlassian also has a Cloud to Cloud migration tool, but it isn't very feature rich at the moment, and has a lot of limitations that make it useful only on a pretty simple environment. I'd expect this tool to become more feature rich over time, but that doesn't help you today.

If you are on, or plan to be on, a Cloud Enterprise tier, you could open a Support ticket and add the acquired Cloud instance to your Org.  That would allow you to add it to your IDP and centrally manage the instance without additional cost (other than Apps.) You would still have two instances, but it doesn't require a ton of effort to do this.

If this isn't a skill that you really want to have in your tool bag, it might make more sense to work with an Atlassian partner on this project.  My description vastly undersells the actual work required. If you are using any Team Managed Projects on the source instance, those will need to change to Company Managed Projects (another messy operation.) If you are using Apps, there usually aren't pain free ways of migrating the data and functionality they provide. Oh there's more!  We partners do a ton of this sort of stuff, so we have a vast amount of institutional knowledge that we have gained from a wide range of this type of migration.  I hope that helps!

[Dave Hattig]

Thank you. It does help a bit.