Can a knowledge base be restricted to only a certain portion of a space?

Question

Hello,

Our team has a Confluence space that contains User Guides which we would like to serve as a knowledge base for our Service Desk project. The space also contains other pages dealing with our team's policies, projects, system configurations, etc. We do not want these pages to be included in the knowledge base.

I realize that, once the user is on an actual request form, the automatic search can be restricted by label, and we are using that feature to get the most appropriate pages to the user.

However, when the user is on the top level Service Desk page, or is in our portal but has not yet chosen a request type, the Search mechanism returns search results for our entire space. We would love to find a way to restrict these results so that only pages from the relevant portion of our space are returned.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Dave Hollinden

Support Engineer

ITHAKA

Dave Hollinden · Answer

Hi Maarten,

Thank you, I appreciate your suggestion. Sorry, though, that I wasn't more specific in my original request. It's important to us that our entire space is accessible to everyone within Confluence, so page restrictions won't get us where we want to be.

The problem is not that the projects, team policies, etc. pages shouldn't be viewed by others. The problem is that when searching in the portal,  those pages are very likely not relevant. For example, if a user wants help with placing a photo on a Confluence page, we want a search on "photo" to return relevant pages from our User Guides, not pages with photos from our team retreat.

What we need could be accomplished with a page restriction that could prevent access from the portal, but that doesn't exist.

Or from another angle, it'd be great if we could integrate a single tree in our space as a knowledge base instead of the entire space.

As things are, the only solution I can think of is to create a separate space just for our User Guides and use that as our knowledge base. That's definitely not desirable, but it's at least possible.

Thanks,

Dave

Maarten Cautreels · Answer

Hi Dave,

If you put Page Restrictions on the pages that should be private, they won't be returned by the search on the portal (even if the label matches).

So if you're tree structures is the following:

* User Guides* User Guide A
* User Guide B
* ...

* Team Policies* Team Policy A
* Team Policy B
* ...

* Projects
* ...

You should put Page Restrictions for you team only on both the parent page Team Policies, Projects, ... Page Restrictions are automatically inherited to child pages thus pages like Team Policy A and Team Policy B won't be visible on the JSD portal.

Best,

Maarten