Now Generally Available, Multiple Help Centers!

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community 👋 ,

When we launched our early access program for multiple help centers, our goal was to enable our Jira Service Management customers with the capabilities to deliver an exceptional help-seeking journey and offer a broader range of smooth, customized support experiences for help-seekers.

We are excited to share that we have reached our goal. As of today, multiple help centers is generally available for Jira Service Management Premium and Enterprise customers!

Now, Jira Service Management customers can curate and design distinct help centers tailored for different teams or audiences within the same site, each with its own unique branding, homepage modifications, and announcements.

This is especially helpful for organizations serving a diverse range of stakeholders, including internal audiences (such as employees and contractors) and external audiences (such as customers and partners).

Multiple Help Centers

This new capability will allow you to create and customize additional Help Centers within the same site, each with custom branding, homepage modifications, and announcements. Now you can:

• Create more than one help center: Design distinct help centers for various teams or audiences to improve clarity in accessing assistance

• Customize branding elements: Ensuring each help center aligns with its specific brand identity.

• Create announcements and topics: Keep your users informed with relevant updates and organized content based on the specific audience of the help center.

• Feature or hide portals on the home page: Control the visibility of each help center with different portals to streamline user navigation

• Set a custom URL link: Provide easy-to-remember URLs for each help center.

This is just the beginning of a series of releases coming to Jira Service Management’s help center. Multiple help centers mark the first step in our broader commitment to significantly enhancing the flexibility and personalization of the help center for organizations and their help seekers. Stay tuned for more to come!

Share your feedback

We are constantly striving to enhance your Jira Service Management experience. Try multiple help centers and share your feedback with us. Your input drives our improvement, and we look forward to hearing how this feature enhances your experience.

Get started with Multiple Help Centers

To create and manage a new help center:

1. Go to your current help center.

2. Select your avatar, and from the dropdown, select Create help center.
   
   
   
   

3. Enter a name and URL slug for your new help center and select Create.

You can also create a new help center and manage your existing help centers by going to the help center management page. To view and manage your help centers:

1. Go to your current help center.

2. Select your avatar, and from the dropdown, select View all help centers.

Next - Start customizing and branding your help center.

Note: Customers who are on the “Bundled” release track will receive this update on August 13, 2024.

Interested in joining an Early Access Program? Check out our Help Center Flexibility Early Access Program, which will allow you to test and provide feedback on help center layouts, adding images, videos, and context.

[Elena Lurye]

This is awesome news!

I have a question about it, though. I tested it now and noticed that although I can separate projects by specific portals and brand these portals separately, under "Recently used request forms" below the form list I can still see request forms from other portals and use them to submit requests...

This would be confusing to the users.
Are there any plans to hide unrelated request forms from other portals and not to expose them in the current one?

Thanks!

[Muhammad Fahad]

Great news!

[Alan Skillings]

The new options are great.  I second the comment above about "Recently used requests forms" and also would like to be able to set the knowledge searching to use different sources based on the Help Center.  If I created a HR Help Center and an IT Help Center the knowledge available to be searched should be different, HR knowledge in HR Help Center and IT knowledge in the IT Help Center.  Having it all be searchable in both Help Centers is confusing.  Also, the same with the forms / request types, when using the main search box, I would rather search for content relevant to the Help Center not all knowledge and forms available.  The current setup really is only a cosmetic look and feel for the users, it is the same content for both Help Centers.

[Ken Young]

@Tori Stitt Thanks for the announcement.  We are currently using this.  When adding a new "Customer" to JSM via the GUI, it asks for their information, as well as their default help center (and organzation info).

• How do you update this for customers/user?  Is there a method to do this via a GUI, or a REST api available? 
• What url would you provide to end users that would rout them to their default help center?

Thank you for this useful feature.

[Sushant Koshy]

@Elena Lurye @Alan Skillings - Thank you for your feedback.

We are working on a capability that will allow you to select specific Projects for each Help Center. We will ensure that requests from only those projects show up in search or in recently used request forms. 

[Sushant Koshy]

@Ken Young - Thanks for trying out this feature.

We want to clarify that when you see the Help Center option in the customer invite, we are ensuring that the customers land on the right Help Center once they sign up. However, we don't use this information beyond the invite flow. 

We don't have a concept of "default Help Center" that goes beyond customer invitation. 

[Naveenkumar Mohanasundaram]

@Sushant Koshy @Tori Stitt 

Is this new feature available to the Data Center (on-prem) JSM version?

[Sushant Koshy]

@Naveenkumar Mohanasundaram - This feature is only available on JSM Cloud. 

[Dominik Gerschwitz]

Thank you for the new feature. Is there a plan to allow specific request types within a project to be published only in certain Help Centers? This would definitely help us, as we currently can't selectively grant portal access to specific groups. Right now, I see exactly the same request types across all Help Centers, which doesn't provide much value for us. Or have I overlooked an option to select request types by Help Centers?

[Tobias H]

Hello!

To preface: I have not looked around myself, so it might be obvious, but:

Is there a way to tie the portals in the different help centers to the same projects?
As in, can we have one internal help center where all our employees turn to, but then another help center which would be reachable by new hires that has yet started or old employees that are still in contact with IT for one or the other reason?

[Dan W]

I like being able to create multiple help centers a couple of questions

1. What is the limit to how many help centers? 
   1. Per service project or instance
2. How are customers configured?
   1. we currently have 3 Service desks projects, 1 is targeted to a specific customer base.  I would like to use the new request based security to combine 2 of the desks into 1 as they will be served by the same Agents.  Am I able to restrict visibility to the targeted portal by using request security or is there a different security configuration I can use to define the customers for a help center?

[Emilie Mercier]

Is there a way to keep the different help centers completely seperated?  If users have access to help center X, I don't want them to be able to see requests in help center Y.  

[Josh]

@Dan W I too am curious about any sort of limits regarding multiple help centers.

@Emilie Mercier as far as I can tell, the standard customer access settings would be applicable with multiple help centers. It would be no different than multiple projects in the same help center. 
How customer access settings impact project permissions | Jira Service Management Cloud | Atlassian Support

Request Type restrictions would also come into play. Add or remove restrictions on request types | Jira Service Management Cloud | Atlassian Support

If anyone else knows more about access / permissions in multiple help centers, I'm all ears.

[Sushant Koshy]

Hey folks, answers to some of the questions asked here:

• Help Center limit - You can create up to 300 Help Centers per site
• Restricting audience to specific Help Centers - Help Centers don't have separate access controls. Site-level access controls are applied to all Help Centers. In the future, we may consider providing Help Center level controls, but we don't have anything planned for the next couple of quarters.
• Associating projects to Help Centers - We are planning to provide an ability to control the projects which are associated with a specific Help Center. For now, you could hide projects from the home page (however they will show up on Search). 

[Josh]

Thank you for the very helpful clarifications, @Sushant Koshy!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks - well done on the GA of multiple help centers!!!

Question on the permissions - will links to JSM projects OR Request types that are not part of a help center be blocked from being accessible?

Eg if JSM project CDE was not set to be displayed on help center ABC, but if a users somehow gets a link to a request type form on CDE then it should not show ...

Please advise? Thanks in advance

[Andrew Ermon]

@Elena Lurye @Alan Skillings  @Ken Young  Read through your comments and the Atlassian product team responses, and have summarized everything here.

TL;DR For all of your questions/feedback, the answer is NO, these functions don't currently exist in the product today. And the only one that has the potential to be rolled out in a medium term future release is the "ability to control the projects which are associated with a specific Help Center".

Details (copy-pasted from Atlassian product team comments):

• Help Center limit - You can create up to 300 Help Centers per site
• Restricting audience to specific Help Centers - Help Centers don't have separate access controls. Site-level access controls are applied to all Help Centers. In the future, we may consider providing Help Center level controls, but we don't have anything planned for the next couple of quarters.
• Associating projects to Help Centers - We are planning to provide an ability to control the projects which are associated with a specific Help Center. For now, you could hide projects from the home page (however they will show up on Search). 

• URL that will route users to their default help center - When you see the Help Center option in the customer invite, we are ensuring that the customers land on the right Help Center once they sign up. However, we don't use this information beyond the invite flow. We don't have a concept of "default Help Center" that goes beyond customer invitation.

This is a similar feeling I get when reviewing product releases from other enterprise SaaS products. A first reaction of "awesome, finally!" and then quickly followed by "wow, that limitation basically kills this for my use case".

[Dan W]

I am all for an MVP the key will be how quickly they iterate and add the features that are needed to make the feature usable to additional use cases. 

[Jacek]

I am not sure if i understand it wrong. Should it be possible to have different request types for different help center?
I do not see any option or configuration for it at this moment. Just tried it out a few minutes ago.

[Aaron Geister]

Is there going to be a way to make a help center the default. Right now, for some reason on one of our client sites it is showing two default help centers. We want to make a new help center a default but there is no option so the link from the project pushes agents to the default help center using the link from the project in Channels > portal. 
Our two default help centers should that be a support ticket? 

[Dimitar I_ Dimitrov]

I am trying this feature to create additional help centers. I do have the following question - when I create a new Help Center, where do I configure what projects/topics/tiles appear in it or not?

And where is the general configuration of the various Help Center portals?

In general, when you are in a JSM project, you go to Portal Settings to do that, but when I am there I do not see the option to configure separate help center sites?... I guess a bit more info on the topic would be wonderful.

Thanks.

[Yatish Madhav]

Just adding another comment.

I am loving the capability of the new help centers and the page layouts and the rich text and the customizability ...

However, I don't like that if I hide a service desk project on a help center, users can still get to it by changing it in the URL bar OR searching for request types (even if those projects are Open and not Restricted)

My simple mind suggests that it should be a simple "if (! projectVisibleOnCurrentHelpCenter) doNotShowRequestTypesFromAllOtherProjects();" 

:)

[Thibaut Julien_Elements-Apps_]

Hi there,
Here are some additionnal limitations I currently spot on the multiple help centers feature.

• Help Center Announcement → Announcements are currently tailored to each individual Help Center. It is not possible to create announcements at the Help Center level that would be inherited by all other Help Centers.
• Help Center customization mass update - Currently, bulk updating your Help Center is not feasible. Each time you create a new help center, you must individually choose whether to hide your various projects. For instance, if you have 50 projects and wish to hide 49 of them, you will need to click the "Hide" feature button 49 times.
• Help Centers customization overview - Currently, it is challenging to gain a comprehensive overview of the setup of your help centers. In a complex organization with multiple help centers, it can be difficult for Jira Administrators to remember which project is visible on each help center. It is also applicable to featured project
• Customize visible and hidden Service request or Group - Currently, the hide feature is limited to the project level, meaning you cannot customize it for individual help centers. While you can make project-specific customizations, these changes will affect all your help centers uniformly.
• Knowledge Base and self-service - Is there a way to customize some help center in order to limitate access to only some specific Knowledge base (imagine you create an help center for HR only, is it possible to only limitate your search engine to HR Knowledge articles?) - I believe today there is not such limitations ? I haven't had the time to study more this part related with self-service capabilities maybe someone will have more to share ?

Please don't hesitate to amend and share your feedbacks

[Josh]

@Thibaut Julien_Elements-Apps_ all excellent observations!

I would also like to see a way to determine whether new projects are automatically added to all help centers (or not). Right now, we have to remember to manually go into every help center to hide a new project that only applies to one or two help centers.

[Jakub Talarczyk]

hi there, for us it will be useful as well to have restriction of who can access which helpcenter.

In our use case we would like to have a separate Help Center for our Partners and a separate Help Center for our Internal Employees and maybe in the future a separate Help Center for our External Clients. I don't want our Partners or Clients to see our "Internal Employees Help Center" page. Even if they don't have access to any of the service projects there, the information on the page itself can be sensitive.

So if you could take that into consideration, I would be more than happy :)