Create a Public Help Center or Knowledge Base with Scroll Viewport for Confluence

[#1]

Atlassian Confluence is a great place to write your documentation. It's easy to work with and makes collaborating as a team simple. But once you've finalized your documentation – especially if it's help documentation you're writing – how do you publish it so your users can access it?

Making a Confluence space(s) public is a great first step in sharing your documentation, but it's not an ideal experience for several reasons:

• URL – Confluence page URLs are intended to be internal facing, so they can appear strange to external users.

• Branding – There aren't many options for modifying Confluence to fit your brand which can lead to mistrust of your content.

• Navigation – While navigating multiple Confluence spaces is very natural for authors, it can feel unintuitive and disconnected to users.

Unify Your Content as a Help Center or Public Knowledge Base

To make your documentation accessible and useful to your users, you can turn your Confluence space(s) into a public help center or knowledge base. 

Offering a proper help center benefits both your team and your users by:

• Making your users happy by enabling them to quickly find the answers they're looking for.
• Reducing costs and increasing efficiency by deflecting support tickets.
• Showcasing your organization as a hub of useful knowledge.

At K15t, we're always looking to help teams do more with their Confluence documentation, which is why we offer Scroll Viewport. With this app, you can deliver your Confluence content to users in the form of a custom help center or knowledge base. It offers customization options to give your content a unique look and feel, the ability to integrate with customer support systems, and the flexibility to control what you publish to users and when.

Examples of Help Centers Built on Confluence

In addition to our own K15t help center, we wanted to share a few examples of help centers that teams have created using Scroll Viewport: 

Atlassian's Documentation

UConn's IT Knowledge Base

Teamlead's App Documentation

Are you looking to create something similar? Here are some of the reasons why Confluence and Scroll Viewport make for a great help center solution: 

Start with Your Existing Documentation

If you already have your documentation in Confluence, then it's time to put it to work. The content displayed in the Scroll Viewport theme is delivered directly from the space in Confluence, so unlike other systems, you won't need to update your internal and customer-facing documentation separately. Edit directly in Confluence, and those changes are reflected on your public help center.

Here's an example of a page in Confluence and what that same page looks like to your end users in the Viewport theme (click/tap to see it in action):

Just make sure it's in good shape before delivering it to your users. If you don't consider yourself a tech writer, luckily there is plenty of advice and best practices for how you can improve your existing documentation. 

Get the Whole Team Involved

This is where a tool like Confluence really shines. You can save time and get everyone on the same page by working with a single source of documentation. 

With everyone – tech writers, engineers, product managers, marketers, etc. – in Confluence, you can create, edit, and modify your documentation as a team. Define processes for the documentation, reference content, and provide input or receive feedback, all without the overhead of working in multiple systems. You'll be able to produce and deliver higher quality documentation in a fraction of the time – and your users will thank you for it!

Make Your Documentation Both Beautiful and Functional

With Scroll Viewport's Help Center theme, you can customize the colors, images, navigation and layout of your help center to create an online help experience that's unique to your brand.

But it's not just about look and feel. Sometimes your Confluence documentation doesn't have the answers your users are looking for. Point them in the right direction by integrating your customer support system with your help center or knowledge base so customers can contact your service team to get the answers they need. Embed popular customer support systems such as Jira Service Desk Cloud and Zendesk to complete the help journey for your users.

You can also integrate with Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Console to help understand which pieces of content your users find most useful. Over time, you'll be able to improve your documentation with the knowledge of how your users consume it.

Try It on Your Docs

If you're ready to work some magic on your docs, Scroll Viewport is available on Confluence Cloud, Server and Data Center and you can try it free on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Interested in more on this topic? My team recently hosted a webinar where we shared our own story of how we at K15t manage documentation for our apps as a help center using Confluence and Scroll Viewport. You can access the recording here to learn more about how our Confluence help center has made a huge impact both for our team and our customers.

[Eimear Kerr]

• URL – Confluence page URLs are intended to be internal facing, so they can appear strange to external users.

Is this still the case? Thanks

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Hi @Eimear Kerr, yes it is. But we’re excited to hear from the Confluence team that they’re working on support for custom domains, but the implementation seems a bit strange.

I think this will be better, for sure, but it still won’t be as flexible as a fully custom domain like you can achieve using Scroll Viewport.

[Christian Zamora]

Does the client-facing help center support the AI feature?

[Sathish T]

Would it be possible to password protect few pages of the documentation so as to provide access to only a specific set of external users through this?