Power up your knowledge base with Confluence

[#1]

Connect Confluence to Jira Service Management and improve your knowledge base by collaborating with outside teams who don’t need to manage requests in Jira, but do need access to create, edit, and provide feedback on articles.

Try Confluence for free

Hi! My name is Jacob, and I’m on the Confluence integrations team at Atlassian. We believe that each Atlassian product solves unique problems for each of our customers, and that when combined, Atlassian offers the best solution for teams to get work done.

With that in mind, my team focuses on how Atlassian can build seamless integrations across our suite of products—you might not even be aware you’re using another Atlassian product!

For example, did you know that Jira Service Management’s native knowledge base is powered by Confluence? When you navigate to the ‘Knowledge base’ tab in a Jira Service Management project, you have the option to create an internal or customer-facing knowledge base.

By creating a self-serve online library of information about products, services, or any other topic, you can empower your customers to find answers to their questions, giving you and your team valuable time back. In fact, using a Confluence-powered knowledge base with Jira Service Management has been shown to deflect up to 45% of customer-reported requests. And it’s easy to get started.

Why use Confluence to help manage your knowledge base

“I want to collaborate with more teammates across my organization on knowledge base articles, but I don’t want to pay for them to have a Jira Service Management license because they don’t need to manage requests in Jira.”

-ITSM customer

Many customers already use and love managing their knowledge base directly from Jira Service Management. But the most common thing we hear is they can’t create and edit articles alone—they need help from people in IT, HR, Finance, Legal, Accounting, and other departments to provide feedback and updates to the knowledge base.

This is where the power of Confluence comes in. By signing up for a free Confluence site, you can give up to 10 members of any team, who probably wouldn’t need access to any other Jira Service Management functionality, the ability to create, edit, and give feedback on knowledge base articles. They do this directly inside Confluence, at no additional cost.

Simply sign up for Confluence (which can also be done at top-left product switch menu: start.atlassian.com) to add a Confluence instance to the same site as Jira Service Management. In Confluence, you will see a Confluence space with the same title as your Jira Service Management project—this is the same content found in your Jira Service Management knowledge base. Now, you can add any teammate to that Confluence space for them to collaborate on articles. Your Jira Service Management knowledge base and Confluence space page tree will be in sync—any changes they make in Confluence will automatically update in your knowledge base.

I should also mention that by adding Confluence, you get even more capabilities to keep your knowledge base up-to-date and organized when updating it in Confluence, including:

• Adding in-line comments to articles for more specific feedback

• @ mention users in comments

• Article archiving

• Move articles to new space

• Rearrange articles (move articles underneath new articles)

• Article preview & scheduled publish

• Duplicate articles

• Additional article analytics

• …and more!

Want to try it out?

The best part is you can add Confluence for free to test it out—no credit card required.

[Alex Ray]

I connected a Confluence space to JSM as a KB, though the search functionality on the support portal is broken - it shows only a small number of matches, and clicking "Show More" loads a blank screen.  Tried on several PCs under both internal customer and agent logins.  Lots of JS errors in Dev Tools as well.

[zubair khalid]

I connected a Confluence space to JSM as a KB, although the hunt functionality at the guide portal is damaged - it indicates simplest a small wide variety of suits. can you plz check this problem on my cps test website page and ask me solution ?

[Jacob Wisner]

Hello, @Alex Ray and @zubair khalid — I'm sorry to hear about your issues. My advice would be to file a support ticket so our engineers can access your site and help troubleshoot.

[Alex Ray]

@Jacob Wisner I did

[Scott Koorey]

Currently, Confluence articles that are longer than one page/screen are rendered inside an iframe in the JSM support portal. This makes it difficult for navigation (a scroll bar within a scroll bar), and also means it's not possible to print the article contents (it only prints what is visible on a single screen).

Is there a plan to remove the iframe formatting?

[Greg LaViolette]

When you search the KB at the portal (not via Request Form), the organization folders in the Confluence KB site are shown in the results. For example, in your video above, if someone searches for "Troubleshooting", that assumedly blank top level organization page in the KB will be shown in the results. Depending upon the size of the KB and levels of blank org folders, it has the potential to fill the customer query with not very helpful articles.
Would be nice to have a similar feature for Request Forms; only include articles with a specific label. Or maybe there's another more graceful approach.

[Samara]

I have problems to grant access to my customers to the knowledge base from the service management desk. I cannot activate the permission of JSM users. Should I have the standard plan?