Announcing Topics in Jira Service Management help center

[#1]

Hi everyone, we are very excited to share the release of a new Premium and Enterprise feature in Jira Service Management help center called Topics.

Topics allow admins to simplify the way end-users navigate content in the help center. Admins can create topics and group request forms and knowledge articles from different portals in a way that is meaningful for end-users. This new capability enables end-users to easily and quickly find the resources they are looking for.

How do I create a topic?

To set this up, select the Customize tab in your help center to open up the customization panel. As an admin, you’ll see Edit home page layout. Upon selecting this, you can start creating some topics!

Let’s say you want to create a topic for in-office employees. You can select Create topic and give it a name and short description like Office Essentials. Once this is complete, you can select items from different portals to add to your topic. For example, you can add request forms that allow employees to reserve a desk in the office, request a badge, and report maintenance issues, and knowledge articles such as how to order a badge and commuter perks and benefits. You can also reorder these items upon adding them to a topic.

From here, you can select Done to temporarily save the topic. Keep in mind that this doesn’t make the topic visible on your help center yet. Once you are in the Edit home page layout screen, you’ll see all the different topics that have been created on your site. You can drag and drop to reorder the topics as you see fit. These changes become available for the end-user to use after you select Publish layout.

Learn more about how to create and manage topics and how to manage the visibility of topics.

[Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_]

Wow! I'm trying it and it works amazingly ✨
Do you have any plans to extend REST API to use this new location - topic?

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Nice! I still have to try it out but I like that you can group items together from different portals/projects!

I assume that if the customer doesn't have access to a specific project it will also hide those request types under the topic?

The seasonal visibility is a nice touch and a good first step towards Request Type visibility configuration ;-)

[Sushant Koshy]

Hello 👋

My name is Sushant and I am a Product Manager in the Jira Service Management team. I lead initiatives related to the Help Center.

We are really excited to roll this capability out and would love to hear your feedback on this! Please continue sharing your feedback here or with me directly at skoshy@atlassian.com.

Looking forward to partnering with you as we continue to add more capabilities.

Cheers!

[Sushant Koshy]

@Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ - Thank you for your feedback. At the moment, we don't have plans to extend this using REST APIs. Would like to learn from you how you might make use of it if we were to make it available. Please feel free to share it here or email me directly at skoshy@atlassian.com.

@Dirk Ronsmans - Glad to know that you liked this experience 🙂. Yes, customers won't be able to view request types that they don't have access to, even if the request types are part of a topic. We will always honor the underlying request type permissions. 

[Curt Holley]

@Sushant Koshy do you need to be full blown Org Admin to create, configure and publish Topics?
As I can't publish (despite being able to access, create and set it all up) in sites where I am a "site admin", but am able to in a site where I have "Org Admin". 

[Dave Mathijs]

I haven't been able to test it out yet, but it looks promising!

[Joshua Kochelek]

This is a great way to create an improved CX - It's like a support Playlist 🎉 🎧

[Jon Watts]

"a new Premium and Enterprise feature" ... disappointed Standard user

[David Meredith]

I like this feature, it's essentially 'Portal Groups' but with the ability to have knowledge and forms from multiple JSM sites. I like the fact that you can re-order them to your preference.

I'd like to be able to configure how many items are shown in the portal group. Showing just 3 means that you can't see 'at a glance' the form that you need. I know you can click into the portal group and see them all but it would be nice to have a configurable feature to show say up to 10 items in the portal group and make them a bit smaller?

[Anthony Kylitis]

The Customize > Edit home page layout is disabled for me. If you hover over the option, a tip shows up that says "You can edit the layout only if you have more than one portal". We were on Jira Service Management Standard and I upgraded to the Premium Plan trial but even that change didn't give me the option to explore what this blog article is about. Frustrating.

Can someone from Atlassian please contact me to assist? Otherwise, I guess I will downgrade back to the Standard plan.

[Anthony Kylitis]

Would be nice to know how to go about getting a page that looks like the screenshot above.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

@Anthony Kylitis 

That’s the normal help center page. Just showing the new topics and several JSM portals. 

[Roemer Bakker]

Hi @Dirk Ronsmans - is this feature only activated and accessibel if there are more than one portals available? I face the same issue as Anthony is describing: it's greyed out but I would really like to use the feature. What should I do?

[Curt Holley]

At the expense of stating the obvious @Roemer Bakker You would need to create another JSM project (and thus Portal), then you could use Topics, even if the 2nd JSM project is barely used.

[Anthony Kylitis]

Followed your recommendation @Curt Holley and indeed was able to edit the layout. Not sure I understand the need to have multiple portals to make this work but that's fine. I don't think I'll be using this feature, especially having to upgrade to Premium.

[Curt Holley]

Put simply @Anthony Kylitis until you have more than one portal you haven't really evoked "Help Centre", just a (Singular) portal page. It is somewhat misleading as the Channel is called "Help center" from within JSM.
Premium is a sweet (spot) level to be at (for many reasons), but the extra $$ always needs to be factored into the justification.

[Jack Ingram]

Personally, I feel this is a poor bandaid to a problem that has been plaguing Jira ITSM for years. Give us the ability to fully customize the Help Center landing page at the organizational level.

We should be able to control navigation, how many sites are viewable, and bucket things as needed to create a functional service management structure. 

We have had to turn to 3rd party tooling with Refined to make any of this stuff actually functional at scale. We have fully embraced Jira ITSM across multiple business lines and have 50 plus desks. This feels like Jira is still treating all of this as a small team tool at a large team cost. 

[Joshua Elcik]

I agree with Jack Ingram, not being able to fully customize the portal has also forced us to use other applications like Refined as well. Not being able to control the width of the portal makes it almost almost pointless to use. 

I do find it interesting that Atlassian shows the portal above almost using the entire screen but yet my portal uses a third of the screen. Not sure if what Atlassian is showing above is the Cloud version or not but its a bit of false advertising to act like that is what the portal will look like. 

[Anthony Kylitis]

I agree with you @Jack Ingram . We currently use Madcap Flare to manage our multiple Help Centers. I would love nothing more than to keep it all in Jira/Confluence but I have no control over any layouts in Jira Service Management. All of our Help Centers leverage the same help articles with a bit of unique content between each one. I can't find any cloud services that support this aside from Madcap, which still requires desktop software although Madcap Central helps get at least some collaboration in the cloud.

I'll check out Refined.

[Jack Ingram]

@Anthony Kylitis I wasn't aware of Madcap Flare. We'll take a look too. We moved from Jira & Confluence Server to Jira and Confluence in the Cloud roughly 2.5 years ago. Refined worked better on-premise, but still more than covers our needs in the cloud. We SAML auth everything with 2FA, and the way that Refined and Jira play together is slightly wierd because Refined uses Atlassian auth, which then triggers our SAML auth, but it works and we have removed most of the friction leveraging CA rules.

Frankly, I simply DO NOT understand why Atlassian continues to futz around with this. Either buy Refined already and close the product gap or sit down with your customers and fix what is literally the front door to your product from a service perspective for all organizations leveraging both JSM and Confluence. 

Seems crazy to me we are still having these conversations years later. When you look at the JSD Cloud Issues Board, some of these requests date back 6-7 years and there are multiple threads.  

[Jim Gilliam]

We use MadCap Flare, and I've tried for two years to get help content from Flare into Confluence or Jira. All attempts have failed, and no one has any idea how to accomplish this. The only thing I can think of is to create a help application using Forge and then attempt to integrate it within Confluence and Jira?  That still doesn't solve the problem of a Help Center in Jira though.... and the search in Confluence and Jira would not work if my Flare output was inside a Forge application.

I really wish Atlassian would help with integrating Flare output and functionality into Confluence and Jira.