Problem

When attempting to share a Knowledge Base Article in Jira Service Management, you may see articles that have a red padlock icon, indicating they cannot be shared. This behaviour may automatically resolve after a period of time with no intervention or changes.

Diagnosis

Environment

• Confluence is linked to a Jira Service Management project and is providing the knowledge base, as per Serving customers with a knowledge base.

Diagnostic Steps

Verify the setup is accurate:

• In Jira: Project Properties > Knowledge Base > Viewing: Ensure this is set to "All active users and customers"
• In Confluence: Ensure that you see the message "Any active user can view pages in this space, including users who don't have a Confluence license" at the top of the Space Permissions Screen

Verify the customer accounts:

• Does the customer account exist in Confluence?

Cause

The user has not been synchronised into Confluence, and as such cannot access Knowledge Base Articles until they have been synchronised into Confluence.

When the customer is created in Jira, any upstream synchronisation (if using an external directory) will occur immediately, however, downstream to Confluence will not.

Resolution

Increase the frequency of the synchronisation time in Confluence:

1. Log into Confluence as a Local Administrator. See Restore Passwords To Recover Admin User Rights for steps on resetting a local administrator account
2. Edit the directory, and change the Synchronisation Interval under Advanced Settings to a shorter time frame