Permissions between Confluence & Jira Service Management

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Hi, 

We are new to Jira Service Management and really struggling to set it up despite months of work.

We have a number of company management Spaces with which we have given different clients permission to.  Raising tickets and permissions is working for everything except access to our Knowledge Base. 

We have linked the Knowledge Base for each Space to our central Knowledge Base. 

This is currently set up with the following permissions

The space permissions for the Knowledge Base say:

We have tried various different settings but our clients can't open the links we've added to our portal or joining emails.  They see the page briefly but then get:

Despite reading lots of documentation we can't seem to get it right.
We want users to read our Knowledge Base articles from within the self service portal.  

Furthermore, some links seem to open Confluence (which we don't want) and some open still within our company portal (but can't be seen).  Can anyone advise the proper way to copy links?

Also, is there anyway to get Support from Jira itself?  I tried the form here https://support.atlassian.com/contact#/  but it says contact your admin (which I am!)

Thanks in advance, Siobhan

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

There is not a general purpose support phone number provided by Atlassian except for customers on their Enterprise plans.

You should be able to open a technical support case with Atlassian Technical Support here:

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/

If needed the Atlassian team member can arrange a screen sharing session with you after the case is opened.

[matthew barrett]

To get Confluence links, add them to your portal in the form of topics. Copy the links from there, even if you don't intent to use the Topics layout. 

You should end up with links that look like the below, and when you click on the link it should open the Confluence page inside the portal and not do a full redirect to the Confluence site.

https://<yourdomain>.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/topic/806999ff-4ad7-4800-a323-bfe168b16apo



If your links are like the one below, then users are going to be fully redirected to Confluence and can't view the article without Confluence licenses, just like Arkadiusz said.

https://<yourdomain>.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUP/pages/111504449/HITS+-+KPIs+and+Metrics

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Thanks both for the prompt response! Some helpful clarification there re the links. 

Regarding the topics - we are using links in the way suggested and have added topics to our portal.  The links look like: https://[domain].atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/article/64389123?source=topic

The link opens correctly in the portal (not Confluence) and briefly loads (the client can see the text).  It then flashes a couple of times, goes white and we get an endless 'whirl' and a "we can't show this page" message.  Screenshot below, any ideas?

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

that additional info points less to a bad link and more to an access mismatch.

If the article link is already the proper portal KB link, then I would check whether the affected users actually have the right customer/account type for that knowledge base setup.

The main things I would review are:

whether they are portal-only, guest, or regular users ?

the Knowledge base visibility setting in JSM ?

the Confluence space access, especially Any active user can view this space ?

So from your latest update, I’d lean toward the permissions model being the blocker, not the URL itself.

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Thank you! Some follow up questions

1. whether they are portal-only, guest, or regular users ? Where do I check this? The clients are logged in and can raise tickets. We added them to our account by going to the Space / Customers / Add Customers.  They are assigned to an Organisation that we added in the same way.  
   I am concerned now that we should be adding them to following group jira-servicemanagement-customers-[domain] - but will this incur a license?  If so, I don't know how to do this because when I try to Add User to the group, my clients don't appear. 
2. the Knowledge base visibility setting in JSM ? This is set at "Anyone can view" in each Space
3. the Confluence space access, especially Any active user can view this space ? Do we need to add individual clients to access this? We have it set so that Anonymous Access is enabled.  See below (and we also have "Allow public links for this space" ticked)

Is it possible we have a bigger issue in that we need to review how we are adding clients to our site?  In brief, we have:

• A number of "Website support packages" - we are using Spaces for this, clients can raise tickets against package
• Client can be in more than 1 Space, we are adding them to a space and Organisation

We have a central Knowledge Base that we are then assigning to each portal.

Are we approaching this correctly?

Thanks, S

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

1. Where to check customer type ?
   Since you added them under Customers, they are most likely portal customers already. If they do not appear in normal group membership searches, that is expected.
2. Do they need to be added individually to Confluence?
   Normally not, if you are aiming for KB access through the portal and your KB visibility is already broad enough. I would not start by converting them into licensed users.
3. Are you approaching this correctly?
   Yes, using separate service projects with clients in Organizations, and one central Confluence knowledge base linked to them, is a reasonable model.

So at this point I would lean toward either:

a KB/Confluence permission edge case

or a portal rendering/access bug in that central KB setup

especially because the article briefly renders first and then fails. That does not look like a simple “wrong customer onboarding” problem.

I would probably test one thing next:
create one very simple KB article in that central space with no macros/restrictions and see whether the same portal users can open it consistently. If that also fails, I would raise this with Atlassian Support rather than reworking your whole customer model.

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Thank you!!

You are correct, I created a test page, added it to the KB and the client can view it.  It looks like some kind of bug on the other pages as I have checked and both pages are set as follows:

How can I raise a ticket with Atlassian Support?  I tried going to https://support.atlassian.com/contact#/ but when I put in my domain I get this:

When I go to my https://admin.atlassian.com/ I don't see any options for "Help" or Contact.  I've tried the Help search function as well. 

Thanks again!!

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

You noted you are Product Admin

Product Admins are mostly not able to raise Request to Support in name of Companies.

Request must be putted from Org Admin / Site Admin.

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Hi, 

I should be Product Admin and Org / Site admin - everything is in my name (we only have 20 staff!)

How does the Org Admin raise a request?

Thanks, Siobhan

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

Then it looks like someone from your company who configured and created the instance made a mistake. Normally, when you use an account with the required permissions, you should not have to enter the instance name manually. You should usually see a list of connected apps instead.

Atlassian Support

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Hi, 

I set up the account.

When I go to Contact Us, I see all our Apps and I select either Confluence or JSM, it recognises our domain and gives me a green tick.

Please can someone help me contact Atlassian? 
We have spent $1000s on this and have been trying to implement is for 1+ years.   This is stopping us from going live and should be simple.

Thanks, S

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Trudy Claspill  @Marc -Devoteam- 

Can one of you Mark this Topic for Atlassian Support ?

@Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

Alternativ you can reach out to me on Linkedin for a Small Debugging session.

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Thanks, will this mean I can contact Atlassian Support? 

I am further convinced it is a bug as we have test more today and:

- 2 clients can't see a number of pages (see the error)

- 1 client can see those pages (no error)

They are in the same Space and there appears to be no differences to the pages permission.

All 3 clients can see more recently created pages.  We have tried different in the sitemap as well, at different levels.

There are a lot pages affected and we don't have capacity to migrate them

thanks, S

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

Not directly, but some users may be able to flag a topic for Atlassian Support. Until then, please try raising a support request yourself.

If 2 users cannot see it but 1 can, this does look like a permissions issue. That said, someone really needs to review the whole setup directly, because from the outside it does not fully make sense. Since you have already been working on this for quite a while, a fresh pair of eyes would probably help.

[Siobhan O_Leary Donkin]

Thank you, really appreciate your continued support.  But - how can I raise a support request???? As explained I can't do this from Contact Us.  I am the COO and owner of the account.

As we have been through and all our users are set up with the same settings. It really does appear to be a bug as the pages flash and then disappears for certain users.  

I need to screenshare with someone from Atlassian - I am paying a large amount of a product for a product I can't get customer support with???

Is there a telephone number?

Thanks, Siobhan 

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello @Siobhan O_Leary Donkin 

This usually happens when JSM knowledge base access and direct Confluence space access are being mixed.

A user may be able to view the article fine through the JSM portal / help center, but still get No access if they open the normal Confluence page URL directly.

So I would check how the article link is being shared, whether they are opening the KB/article link or the raw Confluence link, the permissions in the linked Confluence space and the knowledge base permissions on the JSM side.

The setup may be okay for portal article access, but not for opening the page directly in Confluence.