Migrating Confluence DC to SharePoint requires custom tooling — SPMT doesn't support Confluence. Plan for the 400-char path limit, permission model mismatch, and XHTML-to-web-part content transformation.
No native path exists from Confluence Data Center to SharePoint. This guide covers SharePoint limits, XHTML-to-web-part translation, permission mapping, and migration tools for enterprise teams.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Planning a 100K+ page migration? Split content across multiple SharePoint site collections
The common pattern: one Confluence space = one SharePoint communication site, grouped under hub sites for cross-space navigation. Don't try to cram everything into a single site collection.
CanvasContent1 page size limit
SharePoint Online modern pages have a ~2 MB limit for page text content (the CanvasContent1 field). Very long Confluence pages — especially those with inline images and embedded comments — can exceed this and fail silently during migration. Identify oversized pages during your pre-migration scan.
Decision framework
Use WikiTraccs for self-service migrations under 50K pages. Use custom API scripts if you have specific transformation requirements WikiTraccs doesn't cover. Use a managed service for 100K+ page enterprise migrations where downtime, permission fidelity, and macro translation are non-negotiable.
Keep a source-of-truth redirect table with at least
confluence_page_id, space_key, old_title, new_sharepoint_url, migration_wave, and status. That table becomes your rollback aid, your QA checklist, and your redirect inventory.
The runbook
Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.
01 Discovery Decide what content deserves to move before you plan how to move it.
Objective A content inventory with a keep/rewrite/retire decision on every article and an agreed URL strategy.
Keep these open
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Inventory all content in Confluence
Count articles, categories, attachments, images and embedded media, and pull page views and last-updated dates for each article. Usage data is what makes the next decision defensible rather than political.
Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory -
Make a keep, rewrite or retire call on every article
Most knowledge bases are half stale. Migrating everything imports the staleness and doubles the work; use views and last-updated to triage, and get the owning team to confirm. This usually removes 30-50% of scope.
Migrating stale content is the most common knowledge-base migration mistake — it costs effort and actively degrades the new site.
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Agree the URL and redirect strategy
Decide the SharePoint URL structure and whether you can serve 301 redirects from the old paths. Public help centres carry real search traffic and inbound links; losing it is a measurable commercial impact.
Without 301 redirects from old article URLs you lose accumulated search ranking and every external link and bookmark breaks.
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Map the information architecture
Document the current category tree and design the target one, checking whether SharePoint supports your nesting depth. Deeply nested hierarchies frequently have to be flattened, which changes navigation for everyone.
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Confirm permissions, audiences and localisation scope
Establish which content is public, internal or restricted, and how SharePoint models that. Then confirm how many locales you have and whether translation relationships between articles survive the move.
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Map spaces to sites
Each Confluence space becomes a separate SharePoint communication site. Related spaces get grouped under a hub site.
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Split by security boundary first
Spaces with restricted access become separate site collections with their own permission boundaries. Then split by ownership, then by retention and attachment volume. If a space has different owners, different sensitivity rules, or a history of page restrictions, it probably deserves its own site.
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Archive inactive content
Spaces untouched for 2+ years may not need to be migrated as live pages. Consider an HTML/PDF archive instead.
Confluence → SharePoint specifics
- IT governance consolidation
- One vendor, one identity provider (Entra ID), one compliance stack (Microsoft Purview). No Atlassian-to-AD sync to maintain. Security teams manage DLP, retention policies, and eDiscovery through a single pane of glass.
- Existing SharePoint investment
- Most DC-to-SharePoint buyers already have SharePoint sites for document management, project portals, or intranet. Adding wiki content extends what's already there.
- Atlassian Data Center end-of-sale pressure
- With Atlassian's Data Center end-of-sale timeline creating licensing uncertainty, organizations want off the platform entirely rather than paying escalating DC renewal costs. For context, see our Atlassian Data Center End of Life 2029 guide.
- Calculate item counts
- Each page generates at minimum one item (the .aspx page). Add attachments. A space with 5,000 pages and an average of 3 attachments per page = 20,000 items.
Don't move on until
- Full content inventory with page views and last-updated dates
- Keep / rewrite / retire decision recorded per article
- URL and redirect strategy agreed with whoever owns SEO
02 Data Audit Audit the markup, the links and the assets — that is where KB migrations break.
Objective A content export with markup, internal links and every embedded asset accounted for.
Keep these open
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Export content and assess markup fidelity
Export articles in the richest format available and inspect what survived: tables, code blocks, callouts, nested lists, anchors and embedded video. Rich formatting is where fidelity is lost, and it is lost quietly.
HTML-to-Markdown conversion routinely mangles nested lists, tables and code blocks. Inspect the output rather than trusting the converter.
Data Profiler Profile the Confluence export for nulls, outliers and type drift -
Inventory every internal link and cross-reference
Extract all internal links, anchor links and article cross-references. These break by default: the target URL structure differs, so every internal link needs rewriting as part of the load, not afterwards.
Internal links left pointing at old URLs turn the new knowledge base into a maze of 404s on day one.
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Inventory images, attachments and embedded media
List every asset with its URL, size and type, and confirm each still resolves. Assets hosted on the old platform's CDN will 404 the moment you decommission it, so they must be rehosted, not referenced.
Images referenced from the source platform's CDN break when the old account closes. Download and rehost every asset.
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Find and fix broken links and orphans
Crawl for existing broken internal and external links, and find articles no category links to. Fix them before migrating — a migration is a bad time to discover pre-existing rot.
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Check for PII and internal information in public content
Scan for customer names, internal hostnames, credentials in code samples and screenshots containing real data. Republishing these on a public help centre is a disclosure, and screenshots are the usual culprit.
PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system -
Normalise metadata
Standardise authors, tags, timestamps to UTC, and locale codes. Author mapping needs a decision for people who have left — attribution to a deleted user usually fails the import.
Don't move on until
- Content exported with markup fidelity assessed
- Every internal link and asset reference inventoried
- Broken links and missing assets fixed or logged
03 Field Mapping Map structure, metadata, permissions and — above all — URLs.
Objective A mapping covering article fields, taxonomy, permissions and a complete old-to-new URL map.
Keep these open
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Map the article schema
Map title, body, excerpt, author, dates, status, tags, SEO metadata and any custom properties. Confirm which fields SharePoint lets you set on import versus which it computes — computed dates are a common surprise.
Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the Confluence → SharePoint field pair -
Map the taxonomy and hierarchy
Map categories, sections and tags to the target structure, resolving any nesting-depth limit explicitly. If you must flatten, decide how the lost level is preserved — usually as a tag or a title prefix.
JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet -
Map permissions and audience segmentation
Map public, logged-in, and role-restricted visibility to SharePoint's model. Verify the mapping deliberately: internal content accidentally published publicly is the highest-severity failure in this whole category.
Permission mapping errors publish internal documentation to the open web. Verify visibility on every restricted article after load.
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Build the complete old-to-new URL map
Produce a row per article mapping the old URL to the new one, then confirm exactly where the 301s will be served — SharePoint, a CDN, or your own web layer. Without this artifact the redirect step cannot be executed at all.
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Define the markup conversion and link-rewrite rules
Specify how each markup construct converts and how internal links are rewritten using the URL map. Write it as a repeatable transform, not manual edits — you will run it more than once.
Data Format Converter Reshape the export into the format SharePoint's importer expects -
Plan localisation and freeze the spec
Confirm how translated articles link to their source language in SharePoint, then version and sign off the mapping spec.
Don't move on until
- Article schema and taxonomy mapped
- Permission and audience model mapped to target equivalents
- Complete URL map produced and redirect method confirmed
04 Test Migration Pilot the hardest articles, then read them.
Objective A pilot load whose formatting, links, assets and search all hold up under human review.
Keep these open
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Configure SharePoint with the agreed structure
Create the category tree, permission groups, locales and branding before loading. Articles loaded before their categories exist land uncategorised and have to be moved by hand.
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Pick the most difficult articles as the pilot
Choose 20-50 articles for difficulty: the longest, the most heavily formatted, ones with tables and code blocks, deep internal linking, many images, embedded video, restricted visibility, and non-Latin scripts. Easy articles prove nothing.
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Run the conversion and load with link rewriting
Apply the markup conversion, rewrite internal links from the URL map, upload and re-reference assets, then load. Log every conversion warning rather than suppressing it.
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Read every pilot article side by side
Open source and target together and compare rendering. This step is manual on purpose: no automated check catches a table that collapsed into a paragraph or a code block that lost its indentation.
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Click every link and load every asset
Verify each internal link resolves, each image loads from the new host, each attachment downloads and each embed plays. Assets still served from the old CDN are the defect that surfaces only after decommissioning.
Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up -
Test search and permissions
Search for known terms and confirm the right articles rank, then verify every restricted pilot article is invisible to an anonymous browser. Test permissions from a logged-out session, not an admin one.
Don't move on until
- Complex articles render correctly with formatting intact
- Every internal link and asset in the pilot resolves
- Search returns sensible results for the pilot content
05 Cutover Publish, redirect, and keep the search traffic.
Objective All in-scope content live in SharePoint with redirects serving and search engines informed.
Keep these open
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Load the full content set ahead of the switch
Run the full conversion and load into SharePoint, unpublished or on a staging domain. Content migration differs from data migration here: you can stage the whole thing before anyone sees it.
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Publish the runbook with the redirect step first-class
Sequence the freeze, final delta, publish, redirect activation, sitemap submission and link updates, with owners for each. Redirect activation is the step with lasting commercial consequences, so it gets explicit ownership.
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Freeze editing and migrate the delta
Stop editing in Confluence, then convert and load anything changed since the full load. Announce the freeze to every team that publishes — content teams are used to editing whenever they like.
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Publish and verify permissions live
Publish the content set, then immediately verify restricted articles are not publicly reachable using an anonymous session. Do this before announcing the new site, not after.
Verify restricted content from a logged-out browser. An admin session will show you everything and tell you nothing.
Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen -
Activate 301 redirects and submit the sitemap
Turn on the redirects from the URL map, then spot-check a sample of high-traffic old URLs and confirm each returns 301 to the right article. Submit the new sitemap and keep the old one reachable until search engines have recrawled.
Redirect chains and redirect loops both leak ranking. Verify each redirect resolves in a single hop.
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Repoint in-product and support links
Update help links embedded in your product, in support macros, in email templates and in onboarding material. These are the links your existing customers actually use, and they are easy to forget.
Don't move on until
- All content loaded, categorised and correctly permissioned
- 301 redirects live and verified from a sample of old URLs
- Sitemap submitted and support links repointed
06 Validation Watch traffic, links and search rankings for weeks, not hours.
Objective Verified content completeness, healthy redirects, and search traffic recovered to baseline.
Keep these open
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Reconcile content counts and assets
Compare article counts by category and status, plus asset counts, against source. Confirm every article in the keep list is present and every retired one genuinely is not.
Migration Validation Tool Reconcile Confluence and SharePoint record-for-record -
Crawl the new site for broken links and assets
Run a full crawl for 404s, broken images and missing attachments, and fix everything it finds. Repeat the crawl after the fixes rather than assuming they worked.
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Verify the redirects at scale
Test every mapped old URL for a single-hop 301 to the right destination. Chains and loops both leak ranking and are invisible unless you check the whole map, not a sample.
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Monitor organic traffic and rankings for four to eight weeks
Track organic sessions, impressions and rankings for your top articles against baseline. A dip in the first two weeks is normal; one that has not recovered by week six is a redirect or indexing problem to investigate.
Do not decommission the old platform until search traffic has recovered — you may still need the old URLs to diagnose a ranking loss.
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Verify search, permissions and feedback loops
Confirm on-site search returns good results for real queries, re-verify restricted content from a logged-out session, and check article feedback and analytics are collecting.
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Sign off and decommission on a delay
Get acceptance against the Discovery criteria, keep Confluence available read-only until traffic has recovered, take a final export, and only then close the account.
Don't move on until
- Article counts reconciled and no broken links remain
- Redirects returning 301 with no chains or loops
- Organic traffic recovered to within tolerance of baseline
Field mapping reference
The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.
Confluence XHTML SharePoint Modern Pages
| Confluence field | SharePoint field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Headings, paragraphs, lists | Text web part | Translates cleanly |
| Basic tables | Text web part (inline table) | SharePoint's table formatting is more constrained — merged cells and colored rows often break |
| Inline images | Image web part / inline in text | Images must be uploaded to Site Assets first, then referenced in the JSON payload |
| Code blocks (code macro) | Code Snippet web part | Fewer syntax highlighting options. Code Snippet is not listed among supported web parts for automated Graph API page creation — API-driven migrations may need <pre><code> inside a Text web part |
| Table of Contents macro | Table of Contents web part | Near-equivalent exists |
| Children Display macro | No equivalent | Must be converted to a static link list or removed |
| Expand/Collapse macro | No equivalent | Content is flattened or placed in a separate section |
| Jira macro | No equivalent | Must be replaced with a link to the Jira instance or removed |
| draw.io diagrams | Image web part | Exported as static images — interactivity is lost |
| Embedded Office docs | File Viewer web part | SharePoint natively renders Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files well |
| Page properties / metadata | Managed metadata or page properties | Requires explicit mapping |
| Status macros (lozenges) | No equivalent | Must be converted to styled text or HTML tables |
| Content by Label macro | Highlighted Content web part | Approximate equivalent exists but requires managed metadata setup |
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I use the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) to migrate from Confluence?
No. SPMT only supports SharePoint Server on-premises, file shares, and select cloud sources (Box, Google Drive) as migration sources. It does not support Confluence in any version — Data Center, Server, or Cloud. You need third-party tools like WikiTraccs, custom API scripts, or a managed migration service.
What SharePoint Online limits break large Confluence migrations?
The main limits are: a 400-character decoded file path limit (Confluence's long page titles nested deep hit this), a 300,000 file sync threshold per library, a 5,000 list view threshold, a 50,000 unique permissions limit per list (recommended 5,000), and a ~2 MB CanvasContent1 page size limit. A DC instance with 100K+ pages typically needs to be split across multiple SharePoint site collections.
How do Confluence macros translate to SharePoint web parts?
Most don't have direct equivalents. Basic content (headings, lists, images) maps to Text web parts. Code blocks convert to the Code Snippet web part with fewer language options. The Table of Contents macro has a near-equivalent. But Children Display, Expand/Collapse, Jira macros, and most third-party macros have no SharePoint equivalent and must be converted to static content or removed.
How long does it take for migrated content to appear in SharePoint search?
SharePoint Online uses continuous crawling, but for large migrations (100K+ items), full indexing can take 24 hours to several days. Individual items typically appear within 15 minutes to an hour, but the complete index for a bulk migration takes significantly longer. Plan to communicate search delays to users during each migration wave.
Should I migrate Confluence spaces to one SharePoint site or multiple sites?
Multiple sites. The recommended pattern is one Confluence space = one SharePoint communication site, with related sites grouped under a hub site. This respects SharePoint's permission boundaries, avoids the 300K sync threshold, and aligns with Microsoft's modern architecture guidance against deep subsite hierarchies.