Historically Atlassian has provided openEHR Foundation with a 'community
licence' to use Confluence and Jira for free, which has been great, and
much appreciated. However, the downside has been the system
administration side of things, and we have had problems in the past with
stability and occasionally with upgrades.
It turns out that openEHR qualifies for Atlassian 'open source' status,
and they have now approved our use of Atlassian On Demand (AOD) for Jira
and Confluence. This would mean that we can move the contents of our
Jira and Confluence instances (currently self-hosted) to AOD, and take
advantage of their system administration, hosting etc.
openEHR now have volunteer sysadmins from Marand, Code24 and DIPS, and
in discussion yesterday they all agreed with transitioning to AOD from
self-hosted would be preferable in principle.
I'm mentioning it here to alert the community of a few things.
* there are various 'limitations' in AOD compared to self-hosting,
documented here
<https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Restricted+Functions+in+Atlassian+OnDemand>.
These are almost all either server side management functions, which
naturally Atlassian will control on their own cloud, and some
limitations on themes / customisation. Now many companies use AOD
(including we at Ocean and I would imagine many of your own
companies and organisations), and noone things about any of these as
problems.
o the only technical downside on AOD is that the domain name will
be openehr.atlassian.net, not something.openehr.org. This is a
well known limitation of AOD Confluence and Jira, but I don't
believe it's a serious problem for the openEHR community. We
will of course install the appropriate Apache redirects from
http://www.openehr.org/wiki and http://www.openehr.org/jira
* the major upside is near 100% availability and silent upgrading, and
easy to manage backups
* we get support from Atlassian either way - and their support is
extremely good - they always respond in 24h.
* we will need to do an upload of backed up content from the current
wiki and Jira, and there are of course always some risks with that.
o One thing we need to be sure of is that links still work as
expected. Quite a few links probably point to
http://www.openehr.org/wiki and http://www.openehr.org/jira, and
although these will work, it is obviously more efficient if they
point directly to the new destination. We'll investigate if
there are any issues there.
o We also need to see how the user DB will be restored on both
Jira and Confluence.
* although we are not required to, we should recognise Atlassian (and
other major tool providers) on the openEHR website, which we don't
actually do on the current site, so we should make some addition to
the home page for that.
I'll do a test this weekend on the new site.
Unless there are strong objections from anyone in the community, I think
we will go ahead with this change. If anyone does have objections, or
sees a problem with the move, please post on the technical or clinical
lists.
thanks
- thomas beale
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