How to embed confluence articles in Jira Service Desk customer portal?

[Marius Lex]

Hi there,

We are looking for a way to set up a knowledge base with Jira Service Desk, in which you don't have to type anything into the search bar in order to see a structured overview of all our confluence articles. This structured overview should just be there, on the landing page of our customer portal. 

Our Atlassian Coach told us, for example, that the Spotify help section was created with Jira Service Desk: https://support.spotify.com/

To build anything just remotely as cool, however, seems to require a massive amount of coding. Is that the case? Our Coach didn't tell us that and it would be rather disappointing.

There has been a similar question before but it referred to the cloud version I believe and the workaround did not work for us. 

Thanks in advance,
Marius

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

this is not possible. The Spotify site is not powered by Jira Service Desk. Can you share the link to the cloud workaround thread are you referring to?

[Marius Lex]

Ok, unfortunately our Atlassian Coach wasn't quite honest with us then.

The threat I am referring to is this one: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Desk-questions/Display-articles-on-customer-portal-on-Service-Desk-Cloud/qaq-p/892104 

It is quite odd that this is not possible because it seems to me that this is a rather basic function which would improve JSD a lot (at least for purposes).

Thanks for you for your quick response!

[Jack Brickey]

thank you for the link. I find it interesting to be sure especially as I was involved in answering that thread. However, for sure I would trust the Atlassian Team members response over my own. I am currently looking into this on my cloud instance to understand how it works. As a learn more I will report back. One question, in your server instance what options do you have for KB from w/in the project? Here is what I see in cloud. The only think i see is the ability to group articles and in there i can "feature" them but need to test that out.

[Jack Brickey]

additionally, it would be worth approaching your coach about the Spotify site. I certainly could be wrong but if it is it is modified or involves an addon I suspect.

[Jack Brickey]

Ok so what I have found is that indeed you can have articles listed w/in a given JSD project in Cloud. Here is how it works:

1. you create categories for your articles and group articles under these categories
2. you can choose to "feature" one or more article which effectively pins a link to the article so that a customer will see the choice(s) when they go to open a request. Now I don't think this is really designed to show a lot of articles but rather just feature those that might be relevant/new/etc. An image of what I set up is below.

That said, a quick look at the documentation tells me it isn't available in Server. I also found this in JAC - JSDSERVER-764

[Marius Lex]

Thanks for your help. 

Knowledge base wise we don't have too many options in the server version. I don't think I can categorize articles. I tried it in the project settings (should be in here right?) and the Jira administration. There's no place I can do that. I did see this option in the Cloud documentation, though. It is not, however, in the server documentation.

Maybe our coach wasn't up to date on the spotify website. I'll approach him anyways.

[Marius Lex]

Ok, so we don't seem to be the only ones who need this. Do you have any experience with how long it usually takes Atlassian to react to feature suggestions?

Thanks a lot for the help!

[Jack Brickey]

well as you saw that issue was open in 2014. :-( 

I have seen some suggestion go very quickly but others take a long time and many aren't developed at all. That said there are, as you imagine, thousands of suggestions out there so they have to wade thru them.

[Marius Lex]

Ok, well, thank you anyway. 

I guess we'll just have to wait and see then ;-)