Serving customers with a knowledge base
Integrate with Confluence
To get the most out of your knowledge base, integrate Jira Service Desk with Confluence Server version 5.10 or later. A Jira administrator can link the applications with an application link that uses OAuth. Read more about application links.
You can also integrate Jira Service Desk with Confluence Server 5.6 to 5.9.x, but some of the knowledge base features won't be available. Read more about integrating with older versions of Confluence Server.
Link a knowledge base
Project administrators can link a Confluence space to the service desk project in Project settings > Knowledge base. You can also use the knowledge base settings to define who can create and view knowledge base articles. To deflect even more requests, you can associate knowledge base articles with different request types.
Viewing access
The Viewing setting determines whether users need a Confluence license to read articles from your knowledge base space. This is an important setting, because knowledge base pricing is based on the number of team members who have a Confluence license. Users who have a Confluence license can create, comment on, and search all of the spaces on your Confluence site. Users who don't have a Confluence licence can't create content, but you can give them permission to view your knowledge base content for free.
Setting | Description | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| All active users and customers | Users who don't have a Confluence license can read knowledge base articles via the customer portal, help center, or a link for free. | This option is best if you want your team to write articles and share them with customers. This works best if your Jira Service Desk and Confluence sites share a user base. To ensure users don't need to log in to view knowledge base content, use an SSO application such as Atlassian Crowd. If your Service Desk site and Confluence site have separate user bases, you'll need to create a Confluence user account for each Service Desk customer. If you don't want the customer to use a Confluence license, don't assign the user to a Confluence group. |
| Only licensed users | Users who don't have a Confluence license can't read knowledge base articles unless you allow anonymous access in the knowledge base space. | This option is best if you only use your knowledge base for internal articles. Anonymous access is not compatible with SSO using 2-legged OAuth. |
Authoring access
To write and edit articles, users must have a Confluence license, and have permission to author articles in the Confluence knowledge base space.
To check if a user has permission to author articles, click the space permissions link to go to your Confluence knowledge base space's Permissions page. Verify that the user (or a group they are a member of) has the Add Page permission.
Associate articles with request types
When customers search the portal or help center, they see related articles that might help them troubleshoot their problem. To make it even easier for customers to find what they need, you can also suggest articles when they fill out a request:
In the above example, the request type wifi access is restricted to the label wifi. The knowledge base only suggests articles that are labeled with wifi in Confluence.
To suggest articles for certain request types, use the Auto-search on request types setting:
| Search KB | When set to Yes, the knowledge base suggests articles to customers while they fill out request forms. |
|---|---|
| Restrict to articles with labels | The knowledge base only suggests articles that have these labels in Confluence. |
Create and share knowledge
After you set up your knowledge base space, the issue view displays a panel called Related knowledge base articles:
When your team works on issues, the knowledge base suggests related articles that they can reference or share with customers. You can use an article's permissions to restrict the article to certain users. A red padlock appears next to articles that the reporter can't view.
Create a new knowledge article
If agents don't see a relevant article, they can create a new article from the issue:
When agents create an article, the can choose between two handy templates: how-to and troubleshooting. The issue summary and description are become the new article's title and body text.
Agents must have the Add page permission in the Confluence space to create a knowledge base article from an issue. Learn more about space permissions.