Confluence Knowledge Base Integration Article Filtering by Label

Question

Hello! I'm in the process of trying to enable the filtering of useful articles per project knowledge base by use of confluence labels, and I've followed documentation such as this page: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/add-labels-to-knowledge-base-articles/

But after all my searching, I seem to have hit a dead end. Here's a screenshot of the knowledge base setting, with the desired label selected. For further reference, we're only using one confluence project to store all these articles, so each customer has their own label that I'm trying to filter by, to then be seen in their respective Jira Projects. I've covered their name here.

And here you can see the article on confluence has the relevant labels added on the bottom.

When I go to the knowledge base tab on an actual customer ticket however to look for "related articles", there are many other articles shown that don't have the "blank-sm" label, and in fact they're higher up on the list than articles that do have the "blank-sm" label.

Based on all the documentation I could find, I thought I had it all right, so what's the issue here?

Piotr Rajchel · Answer

Also as another note, you mentioned the suggested articles will only be selected initially on client request submission, so does that mean I probably won't see the intended effects on older tickets?

Piotr Rajchel · Answer

Thanks for the response! I'll try to respond in order of your comments:

For clarifying use case, my goal is to utilize the knowledge base articles purely for our own team's agents, and am not trying to serve these articles to our clients at this time.

I did find that the labels helped when searching both confluence itself and the knowledge base on Jira, yes, but my intention was to use the label filtering specifically for suggesting articles on that right hand side of the tickets, as you've mentioned.

So just to confirm, the label filtering won't actually help in this case, because the suggestions are based on summary and body, rather than labels themselves? Would the best move in this case then to be take the text I made in the labels, and place them in the body or somewhere else within the article? I would like to prioritize articles pertaining to the specific client first, and probably relevancy second; would this work?

Michael Hodgson_z7wss7 · Answer

Hi Piotr,

Welcome!

I'd just like to get some clarification on your scenario, use case, and end goal if possible, please?

Is your intention, in using the labels to "restrict" only certain article content to particular organizations and/or projects?

Or are you hoping that only these articles will display when you use the "knowledge base"  tab (right side) on the JSM tickets, that only these articles will display for your agents?

Also, I assume your clients who are raising tickets, are these "customers" i.e. non-licensed users? (I assume so based on the "all logged-in users" on who can view)

Either way, from my understanding:

The labels added on the "control article suggestions" - I believe are just that, they control the 'suggestions' that appear, i.e. on raising a ticket when entered in the summary or title to guide the user when raising a ticket.
However, I don't believe this necessarily restricts those users from doing a search on the main service portal, outside of that particular request type to pull through any other articles that don't have that label. If they have access to that knowledge base, they can see "all" within that knowledge base if they actively search for it, unless you've applied restrictions on the space itself through the padlock on a Confluence page and specified certain users/groups etc or applied this to the space permissions more generally.

Additionally, these labels in your screenshot specifically applied - only apply on the "request form" i.e. when a user is first raising the ticket - this doesn't necessarily apply the same rigid 'suggestion' afterward.

As for the knowledge base tab, on the customer ticket - you, I assume, are viewing this from a service desk agent point of view (which will differ anyway to what the client see's/is suggested). In this instance, those labels you applied are great for doing a "search" yourself, manually or by using content label by macro or related articles/spaces - but to my knowledge I don't think this will necessarily apply to that knowledge base tab.

As far as my understanding goes, this knowledge base tab works primarily off of keywords, in the summary and body of the text, which is likely why there are other suggestions ahead of the labels you've set. You can generally tell, at least from the title, if something is picked up on a keyword as it will highlight in bold the word it's matched on.

I hope this helps.