The Wiki is a core service much in use by all areas of the university. There are over 1900 sites and over 64,000 pages with  up to 18,000 page views per day.  The upgrade is required because:

• Regular updates to the software are needed to keep the software secure, stable, reliable, responsive and functional.
• We need to be on a version of Confluence that the vendor Atlassian are supporting in order to receive assistance with issues.
• The end of life support date for Confluence version 2 has now passed.

This proposal aims to upgrade  to a suitable stable version of Confluence 5  and will therefore  involve intervening upgrades. Confluence  5.1 will enable us to support externally managed groups in the future  but manage the transition to these gradually, continuing support for internally managed groups for as long as they are required by the mainstream user base.

Management of existing groups within the wiki service will need to be considered in any future deprecation of internally managed groups. The WebCT plugin will be affected by any move to stop maintaining groups within the wiki.  This project will not aim to redevelop this plugin, but the effects will need to be managed.