One of the easiest ways to cut down on Jira support tickets is to help customers or employees help themselves before they even need to file a ticket. For organisations using Jira Service Management (JSM), that often means integrating content from a Confluence knowledge base into their help center or support desk.
Types of users
Users can only access Confluence or JSM content on Refined sites that they can also access via native Confluence or JSM. This is why we recommend you to consider which Confluence permissions your Refined site’s users will have, before building your site.
There are three types of users, who are allowed to view different types of content.
Unlicensed users
Unlicensed users are logged-in users who do not have a Confluence license. If you give access to unlicensed users, they can view knowledge base content per article as popups in the portal, but they can’t go directly to the pages.
Learn more in Atlassian’s documentation:
Confluence-licensed users
Confluence-licensed users have access to Confluence content, based on their space permissions. They can browse the content through page trees, activity streams, blog feeds, etc.
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
Ways to build a knowledge base
There are different ways to integrate a Confluence knowledge base into your support site. Among other factors, this depends on whether or not you use Refined for Confluence in addition to Refined for Jira.
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. Users can access knowledge base articles via direct links or by searching. 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.
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.
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. In addition to Atlassian’s offer to show content from Confluence as articles on a service desk, which lets unlicensed users only view one article at a time, 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. Copy + paste their URLs into the navigation modules.
Make sure to use the articles (located in the right-hand side of the search results), not to the pages (located on the left-hand side of the search results). Read more.
Articles or pages
When users search on a Refined site, the search results may show articles as well as pages.
Articles are content from Confluence spaces that are linked as knowledge base to a JSM portal. They can be seen by all users of a JSM portal that has a linked knowledge base.
Pages are content from Confluence spaces that are added as Atlassian Content in the Site Builder. They can be seen by users with the right Confluence license, or by everyone if the content is anonymously available.