Need help restricting knowledge base articles to different types of users

[Megan]

I am working on a Knowledge base for  a school as part of our project. I would like to somehow restrict the articles to certain groups or at least prevent the majority of users from seeing articles meant for administrators. Due to the quantity of users I am looking to add I do not want to migrate them over to Atlassian accounts. 

Has anyone been successful in doing this?

For example I will have administrators, providers, therapists, case managers, and a few other categories. I mainly want to restrict the admin articles from being searched or seen by providers and therapists. I have already categorized the articles and used labels in the confluence space.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Megan,

It is possible nowadays to connect multiple knowledge bases to a single JSM project. In your project configuration, just add the spaces you want to use.

Restrictions to the knowledge base are impacted by the settings of your JSM project (it can be public, i.e accessible to the whole world or restricted to specific users). Based on those settings you may be able to specify access to your various KB spaces like this:

 

There is also an option Public, but that will only be available if your customer portal is open to anyone on the internet.

Assuming that you will have a limited number of administrators, you might want to add the knowledge base articles for that group to a separate space in Confluence and disclose it to your admins with a Confluence license. If you then link that space to your JSM project as private, those articles won't be displayed to other user categories.

The labels you applied have no impact on permissions. What they do is link KB articles to specific request types in your customer portal, but they can still be searched from the overall search box on the home page of your portal. So they are helpful to make the correct information be found in context of a specific form, but not restrictive in terms of permissions.

Hope this points you in the right direction!

[Megan]

Very helpful! Thank you!

[Jean W.]

Hello, 

This reply contradicts the following article: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/give-access-to-unlicensed-users-from-jira-service-management/

It seems that Jira Service Desk is overwriting group permissions set in Confluence. 
I have created another discussion about this, as I am currently struggling with the same issue. 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Knowledge-Base-Sharing-option-and-Confluence-space-restrictions/qaq-p/1837354