Sapphire-Integration switched from JetBrains products to EvaTeam ecosystem

2024: Transition from JetBrains products to EvaTeam ecosystem

EvaTeam on October 11, 2024 spoke about the transition of Sapphir-Integration from JetBrains products to the EvaTeam ecosystem.

After the announcement of the blocking of JetBrains licenses, Sapphir-Integration began migrating to the EvaTeam ecosystem, which it carried out on its own.

Sapphir-Integration is a developer in the field of information technology for state and municipal authorities of the Russian Federation. High-tech developments, of course, also require reliable tools that JetBrains products once became. The main ones were YouTrack and Space. The first of them is used mainly for old developments, but for the last 4 years the team has moved to work in Space. It combines end-to-end communication, task maintenance, codebase maintenance, code review, and documentation maintenance.

There are two main reasons why the company is forced to move to other products.

The first is the departure of JetBrains from Russia. The company has already received a letter from the vendor stating that licenses will be revoked from Russian users in October. Therefore, the issue of rapid migration to a similar solution was quite acute. And the second reason was Space's product development policy. After all, from the 25th year it will gradually be turned from an ecosystem into a more specialized tool for githosting and code review. Accordingly, such a sharp change in functionality in advance led to the search for an alternative, even before receiving any letters from Western colleagues.

Working without full-fledged analytics is a big minus. Therefore, they began to look for similar solutions in advance that, within the framework of one ecosystem, will be able to close all needs. And among the various products managed to single out EvaTeam.

According to Sapphir-Integration, it was attracted by the fact that the ecosystem is a replacement for Atlassian (although the company never used them in real work, they are generally familiar with the tools). In general, the Atlassian and JetBrains product line is quite similar and interchangeable. Therefore, moving to the Russian analogue of one of these vendors should not cause problems, noted in EvaTeam.

In the EvaTeam ecosystem, the main ones for moving products are steel, and EvaWiki EvaProject EvaGit (as of October 2024 is still under development).

It all started server licenses with the acquisition of EvaWiki, to which all analytics have already begun to be transported.

After the start of work on migration to EvaWiki, JetBrains announced that the company was violating the license agreement. And this means a likely blocking. Therefore, we urgently started an independent transition to EvaProject. To do this, they began to write a migration for transferring tasks, comments and users from Space. The experience is quite simple:
1. Getting data from Space via API
2. Create CSV files from them in the desired format
3. We enter data through auto import EvaTeam
4. Separately, we configure the pipeline and other tools for the needs of the company. The complete transition to EvaProject from the beginning of the migration to full-fledged work takes about a month.

According to Eduard Lunev, Head of Development at Sapphir-Integration: "If we had Jira, I believe that it is possible to migrate in one day, since it would not be necessary to write custom migration."

Eduard also noted the well-coordinated work of supporting the EvaTeam team, which were constantly in touch to achieve a successful result of importing all the entities of the system. Promptly corrected the shortcomings discovered during the work.

We are pleased with the feedback from EvaTeam, - added Eduard Lunev.