How to build a community on the help desk web site

Question

Hey everybody,

I am currently trying Jira Service Desk + Confluence to build a help desk service for our company.

By default, it seems the help desk web site proposes a search bar to look for pages in the Knowledge Base and shortcuts to create various issue types. That's fine.

But I'd like to add several things on this site:

- ability to search for pages in other spaces through the help desk site search bar

- ability to browse pages of spaces on the help desk site

- ability to have a customer community (forums) on the help desk site where they can interact together

Is any of this possible? What add-ons should I try in order to do so?

Thank you in advance!

Jaïs

Jim Ryan_i7qtag · Answer

Wow, we were really hoping to use JIRA Service Desk for our support site and ticketing system, but I'm just stunned at the complete lack of basic features that a "service desk" needs:

* No user support forum/community
* No support chat bot support
* No custom domain
* Limited to one domain
* Limited to one Confluence space as knowledge base

We got two weeks into an implementation of JIRA Service Desk and decided to cancel the project. We're now looking at HubSpot and Zendesk.

It's too bad, the idea of tightly integrating ticketing with JIRA sounds great. But apparently Atlassian is too busy developing completely useless new "paid add-ons" like "Atlassian Access" to be bothered implementing basic, core functionality.

Shannon S · Answer

Hi Jaïs,

As Jack mentioned, you are limited a lot when it comes to Cloud.

You can only link one Confluence Space to your Service Desk as a KB, giving your customers access to it without a Confluence license.

We do have a feature request to be able to include more, so please vote on this and watch it if you want to be updated of any changes:

* JSDCLOUD-170

The customers will still be able to browse the pages of that linked space if you provide them the link to the space directly, but any other pages in other spaces will not be accessible to them unless the space is made publicly available to the internet. I would not recommend this as it will allow your data to be accessible by anyone, including being indexed by search engines.

In terms of community, we do offer Confluence Questions, but you would need the users to be Confluence licensed users in order to use it.

Otherwise you could host a community elsewhere, and link to it directly in your Service Desk, such as your Announcements Section.

I hope this helps but do let me know if you have any questions about any of this.

Shannon

Jack Brickey · Answer

You are limited to the native capabilities.