The initial situation

The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) is part of the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Homeland and is a modern competence and service center of the federal government. The BKG provides geodetic reference systems and geotopographic reference data for the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany and develops the necessary technologies and localizes information. In the fields of geodesy and geoinformation, the BKG advises the federal institutions and represents their technical interests at international level.

The BKG was looking for a new software solution for task management, internal collaboration and documentation of activities for knowledge storage and transfer. The previous solution made it possible to make data available via the Internet, but this was no longer desired. In future, data should only be available in an internally accessible wiki.

Apart from this, the new solution should offer at least the same range of functions as the previous one - but with additional rights and role concepts. To this end, it was planned to migrate some of the data to Confluence. The add-on draw.io was also to be integrated into Confluence so that users could create graphics directly in the new wiki.

The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy formulated these requirements in a call for tenders, to which ISO Software Systeme GmbH responded. As ISO met the requirements and was the most cost-effective provider, the BKG and the Federal Procurement Office decided to accept the offer.
 

The project

In addition to the migration, the project also included the provision of Confluence licenses for the next six years. The ISO project team set up the new Confluence solution at BKG and then backed up the data in the old system, which formed the basis for importing it into the new system. Once this was complete, a trial migration was scheduled for October 2020: The data exported from the old system was imported into the new system. Errors occurred during data synchronization. This was followed by an adjustment of the data in the old system to solve this problem.

It was necessary to synchronize the user accounts between the two systems. This was carried out automatically by a Python script based on the exported inventory data. This enabled an error-free trial migration and a final date was set for the complete migration. Despite the complexity of the project, the migration was completed in February 2021 after just 4 months.

The product owners of the old and new systems as well as the administrators were involved in the implementation on the customer side. The ISO Software Systeme GmbH project team consisted of five consultants under the leadership of project manager Nicolas Brunson.

The result

According to the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, ISO has fully met the requirements. By migrating to the new wiki system based on Atlassian's Confluence, documentation and internal collaboration within the authority improved noticeably. The new wiki is used by the employees. The range of functions has also increased significantly thanks to the update to Confluence 7.4. BKG describes the collaboration with the ISO project team as “consistently positive in terms of flexibility, advice, commitment and expertise”.
 

Key data

Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy
www.bkg.bund.de

Business areas

1. Cartography
2. Geodesy
3. Geoinformation
    

Location

Frankfurt am Main, Hesse
 

Implementation environment

• Linux
• PostgreSQL
   

Atlassian solutions used

• Confluence
   

Advantages for the customer

• Significantly more functions
• Future-proofing of roles
• Single sign-on
• external security
• improved usability

If you are interested in this topic or are looking for an alternative to an existing wiki system, please contact us. Our experts for Atlassian's Confluence will be happy to advise you without obligation.