How do we limit the Knowledge Base articles that customers can see?

[Louise Henderson]

We have a knowledge base that contains our service desk internal documents as well as those for customers who access/raise tickets via the portal.  How do we restrict visibility to customers to see only those articles that are suitable for external viewing?  ie customers don't need to see all of our instructions for handling internal maintenance work

We've tried using labels - this stops articles from appearing when a customer is creating a ticket but they can still see them all when searching from the global portal.

We've tried using groups - no luck.

We'd like a single knowledge base rather than having to go down the path of having two.  If we have a customer specific KB our service desk team lose access to all of our internal articles and the related knowledge base articles that connect to the service desk tickets.

[Manon Soubies-Camy · Accepted solution]

Hello @Louise Henderson,

There are two solutions:

1. Split your current space in two: create one for internal documents only and another one for customers documents only - link the customers documents space to the JSD project.
2. Group all internal documents under a parent page (e.g., "Internal documents") and restrict this page to jira-servicedesk-users group. Viewing restriction are inherited, which means a restriction applied to one page will cascade down to any child pages. This way, customers won't see internal documents on the customer portal.

If you've already tried solution #2 and it didn't work, you may have run into this bug that has just been resolved.

Hope this helps!

- Manon

[Louise Henderson]

Thank you - going with option 2 and so far seems to be solving the problem

[Louise Henderson]

Manon, just out of curiosity - let's say I wanted to go option 1.  How do you split a space?

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

You basically create a new space and move selected pages there :)

If I were on Confluence Server, I would use WebDav to move pages.

If I were on Confluence Cloud, depending on the number of pages to move, I would either do an XML export or move them individually.

[Louise Henderson]

Thank you.  Will continue with option 2.  Creating two separate spaces doesn't make a lot of sense - yes customers benefit but then the support team lose access to the knowledge base from service desk.  Be great to be able to add two knowledge bases to Service Desk - one for customers, one for service desk team.

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

It is actually possible - but only if you're using Jira Service Desk Server, and if you purchase Refined Theme for JSD: Connecting Search to more than one Confluence Space

[Juergen Lanner]

I implemented solution 2 of Manon.

To get it up and running it is necessary to set the application link with the checkbox "The servers have the same set of users" ticked. This will setup "OAuth with impersonation". (see https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/using-applinks-to-link-to-other-applications-938846918.html)

(can be verified in as well when editing the application link, see screenshot)

This way confluence recognizes the service desk user logged in into jira and will apply page restrictions in confluence accordingly.

This way you can provide different subtrees for different user groups for searches. 

[Sebastián Delmastro]

Hello @Manon Soubies-Camy anyway to restrict a set of pages (articles) to a group of customers?

I have different SLA's for different customer groups.

Jira: Cloud. JSD: Cloud.

Several Organizations with several external portal-only customers in it.

Can it be done? Make sense?

Thanks for your insight.

[Simon Leclercq]

i have the same needs... i do not want all client to see all the articles. Some clients to see some of it, other clients to see other part of it

[Mohamed Benziane]

Hi @Louise Henderson

Can you try this:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/add-or-remove-page-restrictions-724764891.html

Hope this helps

Regards

[Juergen Lanner]

Hi Manon, I implemented your solution 2.

To get it up and running I found out it is necessary to set the application link with the checkbox "The servers have the same set of users" ticked. This will setup "OAuth with impersonation". (see https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/using-applinks-to-link-to-other-applications-938846918.html)

(can be verified when editing the application link)

This way confluence recognizes the service desk user logged in into jira and will apply page restrictions in confluence accordingly.

This way you can provide different subtrees for different user groups. 

[Andy Creech]

@Juergen Lanner Looking into this same solution for the Cloud offering. will update here if @Manon Soubies-Camy solution works on Cloud too.