The Atlassian Cloud Migration Project team has reached the milestone of retiring the on-premises Confluence and Jira applications, along with their associated servers.
While retirement planning began 2 years earlier, core project activities officially began in October of 2022 as the team began to gather requirements and learn the features and functionality unique to the Atlassian Cloud environment.
The migration of WashU Confluence Spaces and Jira Projects was conducted in three phases: March 2023 for IT-related teams and departments, June 2023 for business-related teams and departments, and January 2024 for a business-related group needing a HIPAA-sensitive environment.
While the decision to transition to the Atlassian Cloud platform stemmed from Atlassian’s discontinuation of support for its server-based applications, customers within the Cloud environment have experienced notable benefits, including enhanced application responsiveness, increased collaboration opportunities, improved productivity, and more intuitive functionality.
Despite minor challenges in the beginning, the project team soon operated smoothly under the leadership of Assistant Director Daniel Hammoud, Project Manager Janet Deyarmin, and Product Owner Sherri Woolard. Victor Krasnosky shared his technical expertise for the first two migrations and even led the third migration. Michael Ahearn who originally managed the Atlassian environment 15 years ago provided crucial server-side technical support. Melinda Nadler played a pivotal role in composing mass communications, developing and delivering training sessions for all WashU Atlassian customers during each migration, and transitioning seamlessly into the role of Business Analyst mid-project.
Furthermore, the project received invaluable support from other team members, including Carrie Maynard for business analysis, Steve Westlund and Kathy LaBarge for internal testing, and Denise Hirschbeck for change management.