Is it confluence the right tool for us? Confluence vs Service Desk

Question

Hi guys,

we are updating our internal knowledge base for our support team and we have been using Confluence for this matter. We also use Jira for the internal tickets and would like to build an external KB in the future for our customers.

My question is, what is the difference between Confluence and Jira Service Desk? What is the purpose of Confluence and what is Service Desk for? Should we build our internal Knowledge base in Service Desk or Confluence? And why so?

Lots of thanks!

Melodía García · Answer

Guau, great reply, many many thanks to you both. You have helped me a lot :)  Thanks!

Kristian Klima_gtcuat · Answer

Hi @Melodía García and Welcome to the Community.

You can 'publish' you Confluence content to JSM (Jira Service Management, the artist formerly known as Jira Service Desk).

The idea is that you still use Confluence to manage your documentation (add, update, edit, etc.) and then sync it to the JSM - this is what @Susanna Babayan suggested.

This approach has some advantages, such as you can make the content available to both the Agents and the Users in one place, making is easy to search and share the content.

The downside is less then optimal navigation, content structure options are limited, and so is any chance of your customer (or a prospect) embarking on a product discovery journey.

I'd explore what can be described as a hybrid approach. In this scenario:

* Your official public facing documentation remains in Confluence (either natively or via a doc center built with a theme app such as Scroll Viewport which will give your site a much better look and feel and will add extra content features.
* At the same time, you can choose to publish all or part or specific content to JSM - for example there might be 'internal only' knowledge base articles that you absolutely want your agents to have in one place but don't want to expose them to your customers.

Either way, Confluence is a much better tool to create and organize AND consume your content.

Susanna Babayan · Answer

well, they're two different tools for two different things: [in short] Jira serves to organize your work and Confluence is for documentation management. you can create a JSM project to stay in touch with your client's requests, create a Confluence KB and connect it to your JSM project as KB.

you can check these articles for further info:

* Confluence basics
* A brief overview of Jira Service Management