Jira Service Desk with Confluence Knowledge Base

Question

Hey all,

I'm setting up a Jira Service Desk in our Atlasssian Cloud environment for our clients to submit issues.

I went for the 7 day free trial of Confluence with the goal of replacing our Wordpress-based tutorials website with a linked up Knowledge Base in the Service Desk.

I'm not very versed in Confluence (actually quite confused), so I have a couple questions.

* The pages and how-to's / articles I create don't show up in any type of hierarchy on the frontend? I want my clients to be able to browse through KB articles, the only way I can tell they can find articles right now is to search for a topic and if there happens to be result, then they can read it. Is there no way to browse KB articles?

* The Help Center Page (of Service Desk) is extremely unintuitive for clients. We only use one portal and you have this giant page with just one link on it. I'd love to replace that with custom Confluence page that breaks down all the categories of articles I create.

* I like how when clients create a request in Service Desk, it suggests related articles in Confluence. I just also want my clients to be to access those articles easily without having to search or auto-suggestion.

* Am I trying to use Confluence as a more traditional categorized knowledge base and that's just not how it works? I am baffled by how hard it is to find articles for a public user (customer / non-confluence user)

I'm finding it very difficult to understand unfortunately and I've read a number of tutorials on Atlasssian's website. I've got 5-6 days left on the free trial for Confluence, I'd like to know if if what I'm looking to do is possible.

Thanks all.

Anthony Polakos · Answer

Thanks for your response.

I guess my main question would be:  "Is there a way to list out topics and allow customers to drill down into articles under that topic / label?"  Right now it almost seems customers have to be proactive in searching.  But what if I want to create a KB training course?

I've found that customers learn more when they can browser through documentation because most of the time they don't know what they are looking for until they see it listed out for them.

Example of what I'd like to do:  Can I build a page like this:  https://support.atlassian.com/

* It has different topics that allow me to drill down topics until I get here:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud

* From there I can view various articles:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-jira-software/get-started-with-jira-software-937185118.html

* ...and drill down more: https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-jira-software/i-want-to-set-up-jira-software-937185119.html

* Until I finally get to an article:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-jira-software/setting-up-jira-software-937185123.html

Ryan Kearney · Answer

You can link KB articles to specific JSD request types.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/configuring-request-types-and-workflows-732528910.html

You can also use labels to help people find the right articles. They help people with searching, as the keywords used in a label on articles will be the first suggested results.

This page has some suggestions for helping customers use the KB:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/serving-customers-with-a-knowledge-base-732528995.html