Knowledge base and Portal question

[Alex Mihailoff]

Hello!

We are relatively new to Jira around here so I apologize if this question has been asked and answered but I was unable to find out if what I am trying to do is even possible.

We are setting up a New Hire Onboarding process using a form created in Jira. As of right now, it is the only form in our Help Center. However, we have been using the Knowledge Base for our internal articles. When the portal link is access, it goes to the Knowledge base, not the Help Center. This is not something we want employees to be able to access. I tried changing the permissions to be only Confluence users having the ability to view the articles but it did not remove them from the portal and my fellow admin lost the ability to see them either which was strange.

A direct link to the Help Center and, even better the New Hire Form, works perfectly fine. They can, however, click into the portal which will just confuse my users.

I have a few questions as a result of all of this.

1: Is it possible to remove the Knowledge base from the Portal or at least hide it from end users?

2: Is there another place within Jira we can or should be putting our internal documentation to avoid this?

3: How do I disable the portal part completely and, if I do that, does that disable the Help Center and the ability to use the new form? I would like end users to only be able to access the Help Center for making their requests as we do not have plans to provide a knowledge base for users.

I have other questions regarding forms and workflows and such but those are out of the scope of this specific question so I will make another post if I cannot find the answers to those on my own.

Thanks for your help!

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

Hi @Alex Mihailoff,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

When you link a knowledge base to the JSM project the experience on the portal will be that the user will see the knowledge base first before they get to the different request types. The only way to disable this is to unlink the knowledge space. 

[Alex Mihailoff]

I had considered this since I saw the Unlink option but I was unsure what that would do to the articles we have and our ability to access them. Is there an impact outside of just removing it from portal access?

[Mikael Sandberg]

There is no impact to the space, that will stay the same, all the unlink does is removing the access to the KBs via the portal.

At my previous place we actually moved away from the portal because of the way it behaves when you have the KB space linked to the project. Instead we created our own portal in Confluence because we could then show both the KBs and the most common request types on the same page.

[Alex Mihailoff]

I appreciate the help. Unlinking the knowledge base got it to a place where it won't cause confusion with the end users and that was my goal.

I wish Confluence sorted things into the categories we had created in Jira for the articles but maybe that's just a view setting that I can't find. Either way, we still have all of our articles and that's what I didn't want to lose. Thank you!