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What would be the best way to set up a technical knowledge base and a non-technical knowledge base?

Chris L_tb4ybc

We currently have a technical knowledge base that is used by our service desk and tech support field agents. Eventually we would like to attach it to our JIRA SD instance and expose some of the KB articles to end users for self-help. We also have a bunch of non-technical knowledge currently in a normal Confluence space. But these KB style articles could certainly benefit from the Confluence KB functionality (easy workflows, elegant search capability, etc). There is some overlap in audience for the two types of information, but not a lot.

Would it be better to set these up as 2 separate KBs or as one with some sort of categorization to separate the types of information and maybe 2 separate tag indexes on the single search page?

Accepted answers

Matt Reiner _K15t_

@Chris L

Honestly, we've been hoping Atlassian would add the ability to add multiple spaces to Jira Service Desk to support something like this. Two different subjects, searchable in the same place.🤯

While we can't solve this particular problem directly in JSD, you could check out my team's app Scroll Viewport. You can see on our help center how it lets you pull in and search the contents of multiple spaces in one, nice looking, place.

Otherwise, you'll need to jumble all the pages together in one space. I think good organization and macro usage will help you out. Here are two great resources for you:

Rock the Docs - A guide for how to write and organize content in Confluence
Amazing talk by Abi Southerland on how to organize content in a Confluence space

All comments

Sedera Randria

Hi @Chris L

In my experience: sometimes. documents can be related to several categories, with technical and non-technical points. Differents approached I tried :

more efforts on the content: possibly create several pages to make them more focused and reduce overlap (technical Vs non-technical ?)
more efforts on pages organization: labels, extensive use of page properties, naming conventions (prefix, etc.), use of Macros like Excerpt...

Before creating multiple KBs, perhaps optimizing the content and pages structure can provide good results? What do you think?

Chris L_tb4ybc

Thank you for your reply and suggestions. Our organization has done a very good job to date focusing the content on these pages so far.

In the situation we have now, there is a set of documents in the technical KB that the end users use for self help and the supporters use for their troubleshooting (How to Set up a Printer; What steps to take if a printer is not available in the printer dialog; etc). But there is a whole other set of documents that are more related to our organization (Team Charters, Roles and Responsibilities pages, etc) that are not technical in nature. These are reference material that many in or organization may want to look up and the KB functionality would compliment the material very well. However, we know that putting them into the Service Desk/Support KB may clutter that KB unless we have a way to organize and separate the two types of documents.

Matt Reiner _K15t_

@Chris L

Honestly, we've been hoping Atlassian would add the ability to add multiple spaces to Jira Service Desk to support something like this. Two different subjects, searchable in the same place.🤯

Otherwise, you'll need to jumble all the pages together in one space. I think good organization and macro usage will help you out. Here are two great resources for you:

Rock the Docs - A guide for how to write and organize content in Confluence
Amazing talk by Abi Southerland on how to organize content in a Confluence space

serge calderara

hello @Chris L , I am in this same type of reflexion.

how did you implement your page structure then in order that only pages linked to Service desk appears as knowledge base link and others simply attached to issue.

On our end, we first define a specific label for each issue type in service Desk

Then we flag each of our page with that label.
Of course then Page Title and content are important in order to not get the work "printer" for instance appearing in 1000 pges.

For page title, we were looking at prefixing all page which need to be scan by service desk search by "HOW TO : <page title>"

Then for other page type which are more technical as you mention we use prefix like TECH : <Page title>

Would be glad to hear your though and approach you setup and knowing if it is researching more precisely stuff from Service desk

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