One of the easiest ways to cut down on Jira support tickets is to help customers or employees help themselves. For organisations using Jira Service Management (JSM), that often means integrating content from a Confluence knowledge base into their help center or support desk.
Users can only access Confluence or JSM content on Refined sites that they can also access via native Confluence or JSM.
Knowledge base options
Depending on whether or not you use Refined for Confluence in addition to Refined for Jira (among other factors), there are different ways to integrate a Confluence knowledge base into your support site.
Add a Confluence knowledge base to a JSM project
This method is ideal for folks who have Refined for Jira but not Refined for Confluence. When users search from the Jira project, they’ll see results from the Confluence knowledge base you just linked. They can read the articles from your knowledge base in a popup, on a per-article basis. It is however not possible to browse the entire Confluence space as
either via direct links or via search.
Add a Confluence knowledge base space to your Refined site
If you have both Refined for Confluence and Refined for Jira, you can let your users browse the whole knowledge base directly on your site.
Users who have read permissions in these spaces can browse the spaces from the Refined site.
Build a Confluence knowledge base for unlicensed Confluence users
If you have a Refined site with JSM content, but no Confluence license, you can still create a setup where your Service Desk users can access Confluence pages as articles.
Many users who have JSM without a Confluence license take advantage of Atlassian’s offer to show content from Confluence as articles on a service desk. With Refined, you can extend this functionality even further. While usually unlicensed users can only view one article at a time through a popup, you can use Refined to create a knowledge base on your site.
You’ll need:
A JSM portal to which you connected one or more Confluence spaces as knowledge bases.
Articles in your Confluence space.
Refined for Jira Cloud.
To give the portal users access via the knowledge base link to the Confluence space.
When you’re all set, build the knowledge base:
Go to the Site Builder and add a page to your site.
View the page on the site and open its Layout Editor.
Add a navigation module. In this example, we use three Navigation Cards modules, all placed in different sections to organise different types of articles.
In another tab, go to your Refined site and use the global search in the top right corner to find the articles (located on the right-hand side of the search results, not the pages which are on the left-hand side). Copy + paste their URLs into the navigation modules.
Save the layout and check out your new knowledge base page! Clicking a card will show the article as a popup. They are available via the KB link to your portal, also for unlicensed users.
Guidance for building your knowledge base site
which option is right for me?
Before building your site, make sure you have considered the full scope of licenses, permission and access when it comes to Confluence.
There are three types of user access to Confluence content.
1. Unlicensed users
Unlicensed users have access to a service desk to which a Confluence space is connected as a knowledge base. They can view content in Confluence on a per article level, meaning they can access content in Confluence via the portal as article popups, but they cannot go directly to Confluence to view content.
Learn more in Atlassian’s documentation:
2. Confluence licensed users
Confluence licensed users will have access to content in Confluence as per their permissions on a space level. This is reflected in Refined. When you have this option you open up for adding Confluence spaces to a Refined site, giving any user with a license opportunity to browser the content, view the page tree and access activity streams and blog feeds.
3. Anonymous users
Opening your Confluence for anonymous users means that the content is available to everyone who visits your site. Since from the point-of-view of permissions this means read permissions in Confluence you get the same options as in the case of users have Confluence licenses above, and you can add in spaces to your Refined site unlocking all the nice features here.
Learn how to set up anonymous content in Confluence
Articles and pages
When users search on a Refined site, the search results may show articles and pages. Articles are content from Confluence spaces that are linked as knowledge base to a JSM portal. Pages are content from Confluence spaces that are added as Atlassian Content in the Site Builder.
Users with access to both the Confluence content (via a Confluence license, or if the content is anonymously available), and the knowledge base content (by being a user on a JSM portal that has a knowledge base linked) will see both articles and pages.
