Migrate page comments

[heinrich-ulbricht]

Currently WikiTraccs does not migrate page comments.

Options for transforming them:

• to SharePoint native page comments; but those don't support rich formatting
• to a section in the resulting SharePoint page; rich wiki-like formatting is supported
• more?

Opinions welcome.

[Troid2k]

Hello Heinrich-ulbricht,
I have just been asked by one of my colleagues about the Migration of Page Comments. It looks like you are thinking about this and maybe have it in your backlog. Are you planning on adding this as part of a future release?

[heinrich-ulbricht]

@Troid2k Yes, I'm thinking about adding this in a future release, although there is no time frame yet. I am a bit wary because Microsoft announced some additions to pages, including co-authoring and commenting. Ideally I can integrate with that, but ETA is months away and no talk of integration options yet.

That aside, could you ask your colleagues how they would expect Confluence comments to appear in SharePoint? The out of the box SharePoint page comments only offer plain text formatting and basic nesting. Confluence on the other hand offers rich formatting (like wiki pages) and deep nesting.

Some questions about how would that look in SharePoint:

• Where would migrated comments be displayed?
• Which comments are top priority? Page comments, inline comments, other comments?
• Is text-only an option (markup, styling, images, tables etc. lost)?
• Can the comment be part of the page content? Or should it not be part of the actual content?

So far I had not much input on this topic, so this is very welcome!

[Troid2k]

Hello Heinrich,
I have a reply from our customer and it looks like he is happy for it to be a simple form of comment transfer, text, basic nesting, date order. He would like if possible, a copy of the embedded image files (.png) and tables. He has said that the comments need to be migrated into the comments section of SharePoint.
• Where would migrated comments be displayed? <<<Bottom of page would be preferred.
• Which comments are top priority? Page comments, inline comments, other comments? <<<Page comments are priority.
• Is text-only an option (markup, styling, images, tables etc. lost)? <<<Looks like text, images, and tables.
• Can the comment be part of the page content? Or should it not be part of the actual content? <<<No, they need to remain as comments.
Image of sampled Confluence page comments section shown below.

[heinrich-ulbricht]

@Troid2k Unfortunately it's technically impossible to meet those requirements with SharePoint's modern page comments.

Here's a sample of page comments, to demonstrate how limited they are:

Exactly two levels of nesting, text, @-mentions. That's basically it.

It might be that I'm overlooking something. I'd recommend for you or your client to manually create the desired result in SharePoint. Please try to create something that you would expect as a migration result - and attach a screenshot. If it can be created manually it most likely can be automated as well.

[bajahranks]

In the case of inline comments in confluence, which is hidden to the normal visitor but visible when editing the confluence page is made visible by default in SharePoint. Is there a way to keep hidden macros hidden in SharePoint.
(By hidden - hidden to visitors but visible to editors preferably in the edit view)

[heinrich-ulbricht]

@bajahranks Do I understand correctly: the issue is that content that is not visible for visitors on a page in Confluence is visible on the migrated SharePoint page? Which macros are you referring to? Which inline comments? Out of the box ones or a third-party solution (Stiltsoft, Actonic, K15t, ...)? Which Confluence version? I'd like to reproduce this. Screenshots are welcome! And (anonymized) storage XML for a page would be awesome as well.

Or am I misunderstanding and you are just thinking about which scenarios would have to be covered when migrating comments?

As for technical viability in SharePoint: it's not possible to show content in the edit view, but not in the "view view".

[bajahranks]

These 3 macros for example are visible in page source but not visible on the page to visitors. They were migrated and are visible to everyone. Given that SharePoint does not allow for web parts to show only in edit mode it would probably be up to us to find an alternative solution, but maybe the option to choose to migrate hidden macros or not could help with the clean up process.

[heinrich-ulbricht]

@bajahranks Definitely! Thanks for sharing!

I'd like to track this in the new issue #42 since your use case involves a comment macro but is separate from the "non-macro" functionality like page and inline comments.

[heinrich-ulbricht]

I'm pondering several possible solutions for the page and inline comments.

Move comments to a separate page in SharePoint

This allows the existing page transformation logic to handle comments as well. Tables, images etc. - no problem. The page could be linked to via the native SharePoint page comments (just a link pointing to the comments page).

There is one thing that won't work well with this solution though: permissions. When a Confluence page is restricted then this restriction covers page content and comments. Now when migrating comments to a separate page in SharePoint those comments would be decoupled from the page they belonged to.

But then again - when looking at multilingual pages in SharePoint, they also are decoupled and each page needs to be taken care of separately. Changing permissions on one page won't update permissions for translated pages.

Export the comments to a file

The comments could go to e.g. a PDF file that is stored alongside the page attachments in SharePoint. The benefit would be that permission changes on the page would also cover comments.

Store comments as metadata of the page

The comments could be stored as metadata with the page. Like title, etc. This would then require a user interface to show them. This could be integrated in WikiPakk. A menu bar could allow access to the page comments.

But I'm hesitant regarding the user interface and rendering of comments because this would require potentially significant development effort.

Find the right place in the M365 eco system to move the comments to

Where?

In any case...

Whichever solution it's going to be - the use case will probably be archival of comments.

Opinions welcome.

[craigjm]

We just ran into a space we are trying to migrate where page comments are a big part of the use case. Any idea which way you were thinking about going with page comments, or when the feature to support their migration might be avialable?

In an ideal world, we would love for the Confluence page comments are moved to SharePoint page comments, but I don't know if all SharePoint pages support comments or if you can interact with them that way.

Our second preferred option would be to add the comment text to the bottom of the SharePoint page, but I don't know if that is feasible.

Otherwise, either the link to a separate page with the comments or a attachment containing the comments could work to make sure they aren't lost in the migration.

[heinrich-ulbricht]

I'd like to try integrating the comments directly into the page, into a separate section. This is the quickest approach.

A timeframe of ~8 weeks might be realistic, taking the holiday season into account.

[heinrich-ulbricht]

Updated timeframe for completion of comment migration: January 2024.

[heinrich-ulbricht]

WikiTraccs Release v1.9.0 adds footer comment migration, and stores the raw comments XML of all comments.

Have a look at the release notes for details: Release Notes v1.9.0

I leave this issue open to collect feedback and provide updates.