How an automotive giant got lighter and faster migrating to draw.io for Confluence Cloud

With over a century of expertise in building products using cutting-edge technology, this German company is a pioneer of the automotive industry. With an unparalleled reputation, their customers have high expectations, and so do they.

We spoke with their Software Engineer and Technical Product Owner (TPO) to find out about their experience migrating from Data Center to Confluence Cloud and, after reducing their number of apps, how draw.io made the cut and remained a staple part of their visualization toolset.

As a global organization with over 165,000 colleagues from 145 nations, their biggest challenge was to make visualization instantly available and easy to distribute. Their use cases range from sketches, construction plans, and circuit diagrams, to software architectures and organizational charts. A third of their colleagues rely on visualization daily, and they stress that for their teams, visualization is an essential must-have to improve communication among employees.

They therefore require a balance of shareability while restricting access, “We offer Confluence as a collaboration tool to all employees and suppliers, but all access must be approved and documented”, explains their TPO. They also require non-negotiable features like easy-to-use version history to track and revert changes. Above all, it is paramount that their end-user data remains secure.

All these requirements are achievable in draw.io for Confluence, with the greatest advantage being that none of their data is stored outside of Atlassian servers.

“draw.io is the perfect combination with Confluence”, says the TPO. They use draw.io for their technical diagramming needs within Confluence, which provides the essential knowledge management functionalities they require. Confluence enables them to document, share, and access information everywhere, with versioning capabilities. draw.io is seamlessly integrated within Confluence: diagrams embed directly into a page and are editable with a single click; no need to enter page edit mode.

Of course, price also came into play. “The price-performance ratio is good, in comparison to competitor products. It’s easy to use, and covers all necessary functionalities.”

Every serious migration means a deep clean-up of your app stack. Especially as they were moving to a Cloud-based solution, this automotive giant only required tools that could keep up with a fast-moving market.

They stress-tested every tool in their stack to see what would make the final cut. Which apps were an absolute must-have, and which were not?

Before the migration, they used several apps, including another Atlassian-embedded diagramming solution. They decided that out of all of these apps, only one would make the final cut and be kept post-migration: draw.io.

During the migration period, they quickly realized that they needed to scale up and would need a higher Confluence license and a higher draw.io subscription, which they were able to implement without any problems.

Next, they migrated the Data Center instances from the old plugin to draw.io. The migration itself was smooth and painless. Their TPO highlighted that they did not have to take any extra steps during the migration. Post-migration, their draw.io diagrams were exactly where they needed to be: available in the Cloud.

The next step post-migration? Looking ahead, their next goal is to reduce the number of instances they have, in order to save costs and increase efficiency.

Their TPO states, “For me, adding icons – there are lots of them already there [in the shape libraries]!” With a wealth of standard shape libraries to choose from, plus easy-to-create custom shape libraries, draw.io gives any company a competitive edge. Speed up your diagramming by quickly adding shapes and groups of shapes, images and icons, including any corporate designs, along with any custom shapes you can think of. You can even create entire diagrams in the shape libraries to use time and again.

Importantly for us: from a support point of view, they are highly satisfied. They described communication with the draw.io Team as “wonderful and unproblematic”, and told us they have not had a single customer ticket to date, demonstrating just how reliable and intuitive draw.io is for their users.

draw.io: powerful, secure, versatile

For this automotive powerhouse, draw.io in Confluence checks every box: secure diagramming, versatile visualization, shareability with restricted access, and traceable version history. Migration to Confluence Cloud was, despite being on such a large scale, a largely smooth process for them, and they were able to migrate their draw.io diagrams and significantly scale up, while ensuring an advantageous price-performance ratio.

If you are thinking about migrating to draw.io for your organization, get the full picture of the process and hear from others who have made the switch in our Whitepaper, The Great Migration.

Want to dive deeper into the world of draw.io? Access our linktr.ee page to follow us on social media and learn how others use draw.io, as well as pick up some helpful tips and tricks.