Multiple customers, multiple Confluence Space KBs, need to restrict cross-org search and visibility

[Glenn Mc]

I currently have: two customers, two JSM Cloud service projects, and two Confluence spaces of Knowledge Base type.
Right now, customers from cust A searching the KB can see articles targeted for cust B and vice versa.  Also, if they click a link on the portal page it takes them to a "portals" page with both Service Projects' portals visible.

Adding individual users by org would require adding a staff member just to keep up with the changing personnel at these customers.  There has got to be an easier way to both hide other customer's portals from other customers and restrict the search to just the portal/JSM Project/Confluence space where they came from.

Please help!

[Alexandra Bobrow (Instech) · Accepted solution]

I agree that the search function should be improved. We have customers who use multiple portals so it would be nice if they could search within one specific service management portal instead of throughout all of them. 

When it comes to what portals are shown on Jira Service Management homepage, portals will only show up if that customer has been added. Check in Jira Software Projects if you have added all customers to both service projects.

Example: We supply software for multiple companies. Each company has its own group. After creating a new service project in Jira Software, under customers, we only add the group of the company which will be using that particular portal. You can group customers however you like, we just happen to do it by company. When searching through KB articles, they should not be able to see KB articles from other portals as far as I know, but have not double checked this though I would assume this functionality.

[Glenn Mc]

And therein lies the issue: We have not added, and don't intend/want to add, customers to the service projects.  Instead, we had set it up so a user didn't have to register or login.  We have the portal linked from within our SaaS app just for the purpose of knowledge base (we handle service tickets differently right now).  Submission of support requests are turned off.

Requiring login, after already having logged in to the software, would add clicks and reduce adoption.  Our goal is to reduce the repeat support requests for typical items through the knowledge base.

[Alexandra Bobrow (Instech)]

I understand that frustration but that is currently what we do. The customer must log in to our website to use our service and if they want customer support they must log in to Jira Service Management, so 2 log-ins.

Not entirely sure if I understand how you were able to do that work-around, the only work-around I know of is that Atlassian came out with a new feature for Cloud where you can individually share specific Confluence articles with non-licensed users.

I do not think there is currently any way to fix the issue you are having without setting up groups and requiring customers to log in.

The only manual non-Atlassian work-around I can think of is this: After your customers log in to your website, create a webpage with a hierarchy of support documentation with links for each section and subsection in the support documentation Table of Contents to the corresponding Confluence KB article. Have 2 of these. One for project A, one for project B. Then implement a search feature which will search only that specific page similarly to crtl+f so that users can search for article headings. Of course you could also try to implement some kind of feature where you search within the text of all the articles which are linked to that page, but probably a lot of extra unnecessary effort.

[Glenn Mc]

It does seem more likely that I will have to create the groups in each JSM project and enter that all, requiring a second login.

If you set permissions in the Confluence space (or is it the JSM project) for Anonymous to View, then the articles are visible to the public through the portal.  It would seem JSM/Confluence are working per this design, just wish there was a way to segregate the customers without the added overhead of user management.

The biggest thing that got me was the ability to click on the "Support Center" link at the top of the company.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/4 page takes users to company.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portals.  The portals page has the search bar for the KBs, where as the portal/4 page just has the KB article tag groups.
However, the portals page also has links for both portals (for the different customers) shown.
This link and visibility of other portals/KBs is what I'm needing to solve. Sounds like I get to setup some dummy projects and do some testing to see what can be accomplished.
Thanks