Link to refer from portal KB article to confluence KB article is not working

Question

Hi,

Since the JSD portal view is completely useless, I migrated a customer account to Atlassian account to give access to the KB space in confluence.

When the customer visits the portal and start to either search or raise a request, the portal will suggest relevant articles based on what they write in the summary field or search bar.

This will lead the customer to the article in the useless portal view.

Since I migrated that customer's account to Atlassian, they can also read this KB article in the KB space in Confluence view.

What I've done was to create a link at the top of the article view, so if the customer is reading from the portal view, the link will display "Read in Confluence KB Space".

The problem is that while the link is taken from Confluence, it still refers them to the portal view of the same article as if they just pressed F5/CMD+R.

Is there a way to refer a customer with confluence access from the portal to the relevant article in confluence?

Jack Brickey · Answer

thanks Gil. I have not used the feature of allowing customers to access Confluence articles directly. I may play with that as we begin to move toward more external customer focused projects. Thanks for the info. How do you typically direct your customers to the KB articles?

Gil_2dvf2c · Answer

Hi @Jack Brickey

Once you migrate a customer's account to Atlassian's account, you only need to provide them 'site access'.

They can log in into confluence but they will only be able to see the space that is defined as a KB in the JSD project.

They will be able to 'like' an article but not comment on it.

This won't count towards the license. If you enable Confluence access then it would count against the license.

I understand that for some people's needs the portal view is fine.

It could be that I have higher standards for a premium product or I'm just more conscious about the monitor sizes in 2019 and how websites are built.

Due to the nature of complex products, KB articles need to be richer in content.

The inability to render the table of contents in a KB article in the portal view is a deal breaker, mostly if factoring that this issue was reported in 2016 but wasn't deemed important enough to fix it.

If your KB articles are short enough and do not require ToC, that's fine but that doesn't mean it's ok to have this issue since 2016 and ignore it.

The 600px width view is too narrow for rich content, this renders screenshots to be a thumbnail like and the portal doesn't allow to click and expand the screenshot view. This is really bad, mostly for customers like us who migrate from an old wiki to a new one.

So all in all, this portal view doesn't meet the basic minimum when comparing how Confluence allows for rich content to be presented.

Jack Brickey · Answer

Gil, are you saying that a user that is added to your instance have read only access to Confluence even if they are not provided application access? I have never attempted this and certainly would be news to me. Can they log into Confluence directly? If not how do they browse the space and how are they presented access? I need to give this a try to better understand.

For my needs the portal presentation of the KB articles is fine. Certainly I think the portal could benefit from a facelift in other areas and I continue to provide feedback to Atlassian on changes I would like to see but it is quite functional for my customers and a big improvement over previous solutions.