Linova Software GmbH

We’ve always been primarily an IT company, which is why we’ve done a lot in-house and built up expertise. We are – and have always been – pioneers because we have excellent employees and a great deal of expertise,” Löhr says with conviction. Not least for this reason, Linova has always adhered to the principle: “On-premises first” – meaning, “everything we can do locally, in our own data center, should be done there.” While on-premises IT always takes priority, the cloud is an acceptable alternative when there’s no other option.

To that end, Linova has built its own environment tailored to its software development needs, including ticketing systems and source code management, “We tried out a lot of different options and, like many others, eventually settled on Atlassian. We knew they weren’t the cheapest, but at least they offered an on-premises option and the ideal trio of Jira (ticket system), Confluence (knowledge management), and Bitbucket for source code management.”

But just two or three months after the move, the shocking news arrived in the form of the “Journey to the Cloud”: With these words, Atlassian announced significant price increases, especially for customers who wanted or needed to run on-premises installations – in some cases, increases of several hundred percent. “The discussions with Atlassian ultimately came to nothing, so it quickly became clear to us that we had to start looking again,” recalls Löhr. “We didn’t want to – and couldn’t – move to Atlassian’s cloud, partly because of our customers’ intellectual property.”

At the same time, Linova was preparing for four ISO certifications. This required a new system that would reflect the structures of the management system and take into account new customer requirements – not least with regard to supply chains and legal regulations.

Over the next few months, Linova successfully achieved compliance with the ISO standards 9001 (Quality Management), ISO 14001 (Environmental Management), ISO 27001 (Information Security), and ISO 45001 (Occupational Health and Safety). As expected, the certification processes also influenced the search for a replacement for Atlassian’s products: From the very beginning, the company sought a new system with core functions for Integrated Management Systems (IMS). “It starts with simple approvals and workflows, but ideally, an IMS can cover all management functions. The magic word is ‘integrated’” (Löhr).

Although Linova had already worked with MediaWiki and Xwiki in the past, it quickly discarded many of those solutions. However, a renewed search for knowledge management systems with IMS integration brought the Munich-based company back to BlueSpice. The decision was based not only on regional proximity but also, and especially, on IMS support and the migration tools for Atlassian users.

“It wasn’t that long ago – the actual migration took place in 2025. We liked the licensing model and the option to set up the system locally, on a hosted server, or in the cloud. We got started right away with demo instances and test cases. We quickly realized that the things BlueSpice couldn’t do (yet) didn’t bother us that much – we could live with that. And then we had Hallo Welt! build forms for us.” (Löhr)

Image 1: Linova IMS Manual in BlueSpice

Right from the first step of the migration project, Linova set up an IMS in BlueSpice, in part to gain experience with it. It quickly became clear that the IMS in BlueSpice would also be suitable for the core business. The “areas” in Atlassian become “namespaces” in BlueSpice; this happens partly automatically and partly manually.

Linova doesn’t need farm mode; a wiki with over a hundred namespaces is sufficient, even though the company maps “every project and every committee to a separate namespace.” Thus, the business units (directly under management) became namespaces, as did the (Atlassian) areas for a wide variety of committees and working groups, and, logically, management itself has its own namespace.

The whole system has been working wonderfully for a year and a half now; Confluence is dead – “since the end of 2025, we’ve only been keeping it up for show, with employees no longer accessing it.” At Linova, over 50 people have BlueSpice access, plus customers with access, for a total of over 60 users.

Image 2: Linova IMS Manual in BlueSpice

Semantic MediaWiki Query Language, the query language in BlueSpice, enables Linova to use the software not only as a document repository but also as a repository for semantic information and, within certain limits, to query it intelligently. Löhr is very satisfied: “In principle, this replicates the basic functionalities of a relational database system; for example, you can query all systems on which a user has permissions. The AI functions are also exciting for us, especially because they support local models as well.”