Introducing new customization capabilities in the JSM help center

[#1]

Hi everyone, we are very excited to share a roundup of a few new customisation capabilities we’ve introduced in the Jira Service Management help center.

Topics and external resources

We had recently released a new feature called topics to our Premium and Enterprise users. Topics allow admins to simplify the way end-users navigate content in the help center.

With our first release, admins were able to create topics and bring to them request forms and knowledge base articles from different service projects in a way that was meaningful for their end-users. This helped end-users find the resources they were looking for easily and quickly.

We also released a feature called external resources, which allowed admins to add links to helpful knowledge resources, communication channels like chat, request forms and more from tools outside Jira Service Management to their service projects.

After the release of both these features, we’ve listened to your feedback and have introduced some changes to the help center. We believe that these improvements will give admins more control on the content and layout of their help center home page.

External resources comes to topics

Apart from request forms and knowledge base articles, you can now add links to external resources from your service projects to topics.

By bringing external resources to topics, your customers will be able to find the relevant resources they need even faster, right from the help centre home page.

Learn how to add links to external resources in your service project.

Topics, now for all

We’ve also launched the topics feature more widely now. Topics is now available to Jira Service Management users on all pricing plans at no additional cost.

Learn how to create and manage topics.

Hiding portals from your home page

Now that you’ve topics to which you can add all relevant help resources from across portals, you may find that some portals become redundant on your help center’s home page.

Or you may have set up a test service project and don't want its portal to be seen by customers. There may also be some teams in your organization that might want customers to raise requests only via email.

In such cases and more, you can exercise more control over your home page’s layout, and keep it clean and clutter-free by hiding certain portals. This also minimises the burden on your customers to know which team’s portal to go to when they need help. Learn more about hiding portals.

How these features work together

Here’s a quick example to show all these improvements in action:

As an admin, you could create a topic called ‘New hire basics’ to bring together all help resources that a new hire would need in one place.

To this topic, you could add:

• request forms to get access to software tools and services from your IT team’s portal

• knowledge base articles that cover company policies from your HR and legal teams' portals

• forms to raise requests with the security team

• links to important company policies saved in other tools

• link to an onboarding video

• link to a Slack channel to socialise with other new hires and so on.

This would make it easy for a new hire who comes to your help center to get all the information and help they need under one topic, without having to keep track of which team’s portal to go to.

You can also go one step ahead and hide a few redundant portals to offer a clutter-free home page experience for your employees.

What do you think?

We’re very excited to have rolled these capabilities out and we’re happy to let you know that there’s more to come with regards to customizing your help center. Now it’s your turn to have a look and tell us what you think. We’d love to get your thoughts on the experience. 🙂

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Hi @Sushant Koshy 

Making Topics available to all plans is really good! This will contribute towards a better customer experience. In addition, hiding SD from the Help Center is a very handy functionality! Hiding it from the portal, will not change the permission scheme of this project. From a certain perspective this is quite handy, since it will not mess around. From the other hand, it could make things harder to troubleshoot portal visibility (if you forget about this feature). However I think these additions are quite well!

[Patrick van der Rijst]

Amazing! 👏

Great to see that Topics are now also available for standard plans. 

What I would love to see coming to Jira Service Management, and I think using Confluence for this is a perfect match, is the Zendesk Community post feature. 

• Allow agents to share updates, e.g. expected downtime, release notes, etc (allow commenting to be toggled on/off)
• Allow customers to suggest a new feature or ask a question and have other customers vote/reply on that
• Turn these posts into actual Jira tickets (change request)

[Milad S.]

Hi @Sushant Koshy

Thanks for the update and article. Topics will break the silos of service projects which are usually team-based.

I am currently designing our topics, and I noticed that it is possible to add all portal components to a topic except Request groups. Having the possibility to add Request groups can reduce the number of links in a topic. We can avoid adding several similar forms to a topic by adding a request group. For example, we have 5 request forms for submitting a Grant as part of Research Development. If I add all forms (Research Development including Grants), the topic gets very large. I also do not want to have two very similar topics, so I may add the request group link as an external resource and then add that to our Research Development topic.

Regards,

Milad

[Kalin U]

I tried the feature yesterday and I needed two things immediately that would have helped a lot:

• the option to add a link under a topic which isn't otherwise in any of the portals
• the option to rename or add an extra description to the topic item for requests that appear identical but are sourced from different portals

K.

[Dan Breyen]

WOOHOO!  

[John Funk]

Some great additions!

[Dan Breyen]

Hiding Portals is great!  I want to keep the ITSM Sample Portal around for reference, but obviously don't want my customers to see/use it.  

Adding external links is great!  We can add links to our company's website to the portal to integrate the two sites!

[Pawan Kohli]

Hi @Sushant Koshy , is this feature available for Cloud and Data Center environments?