is there a way to turn off the spaces menu?

Question

We have confluence and jira support desk.

We want to supply our customers with simple access to our online confluence manual. We do not want to allow them to see confusing things like "Spaces" in the left menu. We also dont want to show them things like "Space Tools".

It would also be nice to show the left menu with a folding stack of our main topics. I have seen other confluence manuals that have this structure but I cannot figure out how to make ours look like this.

This is what we want it to look like.

Jessie Williams · Answer

Google offers a simple wiki style page, see here.
http://www.sendmyadsupport.com/

Sorry but we would never allow users to see the confluence wiki as is. We would love to but there are too many features which should not be shown to people who are not internal users and there is little ability to customize the software.

Some critical examples are:

* From the pages screen a non logged in user can see "Space Tools". This would be confusing to people just trying to read the wiki
* We often see "App is not responding. Wait or cancel?" at the top of the screen. I'm not even sure what this is but it's certainly another bug.
* The menu to "Switch Apps" on the left. This is another thing we wouldn't want our customers seeing. We have several Atlassian products. Our customers do not have any idea what "Switching apps" means and we dont want them to.
* Help button on the left menu: We pay for confluence to serve to our customers. Why does confluence get to put their logo and irrelevant help menu at the left side of the screen? Again, this would make no sense to customers.
* The old confluence interface was better for this type of integration.

In sum confluence is clearly not ready to allow support desk users to access it as a knowledge base for products. We feel that your sales videos and documentation are misleading.

This is quote from your service desk website:
"CUSTOMER PORTAL & KNOWLEDGE BASE WITH CONFLUENCE

Smarter self‑service help

Let your customers submit requests with an easy-to-use portal or add Confluence to Jira Service Desk and get an integrated knowledge base. Machine learning intelligently recommends the right service and learns from every interaction, so the answers are easy to find. Offer a localized experience with 8 supported languages out of the box. "

Shannon S · Answer

@Mary Connor,

Can you let me know what integration you're referring to? Jesse was asking about a better way to display Confluence to Service Desk users so that the extra Confluence bits (such as Space Tools, All Spaces, etc.) do not show for the users, and only what is necessary does.

Is there a certain integration you needed?

Regards,

Shannon

Shannon S · Answer

@Jessie Williams,

From my understanding, Google Sites is simply a website building tool, which is a bit different than Confluence, which is a wiki software. Wikis are more specific websites that have certain tools and settings that regular websites do not. They are made to have users login to and change information, thus the additional settings that you'll see many of them have.

The way that Confluence is integrated with Service Desk is via the search tool on the Customer Portal. Since you're sharing a link to Confluence directly, it'll work a bit differently for your users.

One thing you can do is in your Service Desk announcement bar, on your Customer portal, you can put a direct link to the space that you have connected to your Service Desk. This way your users won't have the All Spaces listing.

One more thing you can do is when you're on the space as an admin, you can click the pencil icon at the bottom, and add Space Shortcuts. Here, you could add some links there that you want your users to see, right on the sidebar. This might help you direct their attention where you need it, and not be confused by the other options. Have a look at The Space Sidebar for more information.

As for real-life examples, you could try the following searches to see public sites:

* Confluence Cloud Public Sites
* Jira Service Desk Cloud Customer Portals (you may find these mostly require logins)

Your example earlier was Confluence Server, so you may not find any examples above that match your requirement, since they also use Cloud to display their information. Please also note they may not be using the integration in the same way as you desire, but it's definitely worth having a look.

Regards,

Shannon