Help us improve the JSM help center experience

[#1]

Hello everyone! 

Wish you a very happy new year.

We’re working on improvements to the JSM help center experience and we'd love to get your inputs on:

1. The primary use cases where you use the JSM help center today?

2. What’s working well with the current experience and capabilities?

3. What’s not working or feels limiting?

4. If you could change/add one or two things what would they be?

Please feel free to reply directly in the comments, or use this form to share details async. You can also set up some time to chat with us and talk through your setup and needs.

[Yatish Madhav]

Hi @Srini Chakravarthy 

Happy 2026! All the best

Glad to provide feedback on JSM help center! I have been enjoying the multiple help centers, improve look and feel management, customization and layouts of recent updates!

To answer your Qs:

1. The primary use cases where you use the JSM help center today? We just recently updated our 13/14 JSM projects to about 5/6 to simplify the portal. Mainly for ITSM, Change management, Outage management but more so to simplify ticketing for our internal customers although we have about 2 or 3 used by external customers

2. What’s working well with the current experience and capabilities? I think the ability to simplify the way the portal looks and works is great! 

3. What’s not working or feels limiting? Tough to answer this one right now. I would say getting people to be consistant and use the portal more and continuous education one doing so. Perhaps also, like Email to Ticket functionality also have Chat to Ticket feature (i dont use AI or Rovo so I might already be missing out on this) - Our biggest friction is getting people to use and keep using JSM as internal customers as far as possible

4. If you could change/add one or two things what would they be? Probably, ability to edit requests (and additional fields) from the portal end, slightly more intuitive/easier customer/portal notifications from tickets directly and improved pre-populated JSM request linking (eg link to a portal request type form with it semi-prepopulated for support for all fields incl custom connect app fields)

Thanks

Yatish

[Calogero Bonasia]

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to improving the JSM help centre experience.

Primary use cases: The help centre serves as our primary access point for end users requiring technical and operational support. We utilise it principally for managing standard requests, consulting the knowledge base, and tracking the status of ongoing issues.

What's working well: The interface proves intuitive for non-technical users, and the ability to categorise requests through customised forms significantly facilitates initial triage. The knowledge base search, when properly configured, enables users to find answers independently, reducing the burden on the support team.

Limitations encountered: Visual customisation remains rather limited, making it difficult to fully align the experience with corporate branding.

Furthermore, integration with external systems for authentication and retrieval of contextual information would benefit from greater flexibility. Multilingual management, where required, presents considerable scope for improvement.

Proposals for improvement:

Substantially enhanced customer portal customisation: the current limitations in visual and functional customisation of the customer portal represent a significant constraint for organisations seeking to deliver a cohesive brand experience.

Greater flexibility in customising layouts, colour schemes, typography, and structural elements would enable organisations to create portals that genuinely reflect their corporate identity whilst maintaining consistency with their broader digital ecosystem.

This would include the ability to control CSS styling, modify template structures, and configure user interface elements without requiring extensive workarounds or third-party solutions.

Enhanced reliability and transparency in the SLA system: a widespread issue emerges from the community regarding SLAs, with recurring reports of inconsistent values, missing metrics, or incorrect calculations.

Documented cases highlight critical issues with SLA application when tickets are assigned during creation, recalculation problems on tickets with completed cycles, and performance delays caused by complex JQL queries in configurations.

A more robust automatic recalculation mechanism would be desirable, alongside proactive notifications when anomalies are detected in SLA counters and integrated diagnostic tools enabling administrators to quickly verify consistency between configuration and actual SLA application on tickets.

Enhancement of semantic search capabilities in the knowledge base: implementing proactive suggestions based on request context would further reduce the volume of repetitive issues, improving user autonomy in resolving common problems.

It should be noted that this improvement ought to focus on genuinely effective search functionality rather than burdening the system with superfluous chatbots or poorly implemented artificial intelligence features that typically add complexity without delivering tangible value to the user experience.

[Todd Thomas]

Thanks for asking for thoughts/feedback @Srini.

1. The primary use cases where you use the JSM help center today?

We use the help center for our IT and business office departments. It aggregates Confluence help articles combined with service fulfillment and incident response.

2. What’s working well with the current experience and capabilities?

Having one location that can do most of what we want is wonderful. JSM is both powerful and simple, making overall administration manageable without requiring a giant team of people to run it or consultants to manage it for us.

3. What’s not working or feels limiting?

• The integration of forms is still not complete. Forms still feel like an add-on (which they were), which makes administration of them a pain. They also have a variety of limitations vs. fields.
• Portal customization, while improved, is still very limited. For example, there are columns we'd like to show and customize on the Requests screen for customers and define them per space. We'd also like to improve the font sizes of the groups shown, as well as improve the behavior of groups as the drop-down selection isn't ideal.
• Confluence search results are very limited and poor. 3 results are only shown initially, which can't be increased, and often the results aren't ideal.
• Reporting is still limited. Many dashboard gadgets don't include JSM-specific fields, making it hard to understand demand for these services. Using the canned reports could also improve to have additional ad-hoc customization and configuration. Having more gadgets available that can group on fields (especially JSM-specific) would be so handy. Third-party apps are also restricted on what they can see/interact with, and making them more robust and fast would making using the more beneficial.

4. If you could change/add one or two things what would they be?

• Build in the capability to see who else is looking and working on a request at the same time as another agent. This would be like Confluence, where you can see who else is looking at a page at the same time, but knowing who else is working on a request at the same time would be amazingly helpful to avoid duplicate work and confusion from customers and other agents.
• Improve notifications for both agents and customers. The current level of notifications aren't granular enough to show helpful information via email. We'd love to see more detail provided in the notification of items created or assigned, but the current tools don't show that. We have to use an automation to add all of the relevant information we'd love to see and have that set as an internal comment since the built-in notifications aren't granular enough.

Bonus points:

• There are so many small, UX/UI tweaks that could be made. For example, make searching by email address or name consistent- some search areas and gadgets handle this differently. Allow customers to be able to edit their own comments in the portal. Give agents more flexibility with the presentation of work items. Allow us notify a Watcher to a work item when it is added upon creation.

[Goran Dermeta]

Hello, I confirm all of the above, definitely some additional UI portal customization would be amazing, plus the idea to idicate online people looking at specific ticket (for example, OTRS has this for at least 10 years)

• The primary use cases where you use the JSM help center today?

Part of IT department is already onboard, we are just finalizing plans for complete IT transformation in ITSM, with future implementation of business users for internal customers.

• What’s working well with the current experience and capabilities?

Basic ITSM needs with portals work perfectly, usage is simple and clear, so internal customers were onboarded in very short time.

• What’s not working or feels limiting?

Signature filters for email communication is appaling, even automation doesn't help as file palceholders still remain in the ticket and have to be deleted manually. As we are mostly communicating with internal customers through email, we have tickets with dozens of attachments from email signatures. Same goes for signature structure, in email its in the table, but Jira reformats this table to full screen, so it messes up the comment section of the ticket.

• If you could change/add one or two things what would they be?

Signature filtering has to be overhauled, so if we set some trigger string (like "Best Regards") to define start of signature, nothing, but really NOTHING after that should be transferred to the ticket. 

Resizing of the inline images in incoming email. we have an open work item for that feature ([JSDCLOUD-17550] Inline attachments in comments via incoming email are not eye friendly - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.). In principle, if I send a mail with inline image, it gets resized to a small and not really useful image, but if i manually paste it in portal, the size is natural.