Every business wants a simple, accessible "front door" for customer requests, bug reports, and partner feedback. While Jira Service Management is powerful, its portal can sometimes feel restrictive, and relying on email often leads to unstructured data and manual work for your team. What if you could transform your Confluence knowledge base into a welcoming, interactive portal that funnels perfectly structured issues directly into Jira?
This guide explores the value and the method of using Confluence and Smart Forms for Jira to create a centralized, anonymous-access portal. This solution empowers anyone, anywhere to submit detailed requests with attachments, which are then automatically converted into actionable Jira work items for your team.
A Confluence Space that can be made public.
Access to a Jira project (JSM, Jira Software, etc.).
The Smart Forms for Jira app installed.
Before we get to the "how," let's focus on the "why." This approach solves several key business challenges:
Create a Single Source of Truth: Establish one branded, public-facing space where customers, partners, and other external stakeholders know they can go for help. This builds trust and reduces confusion.
Improve the User Experience: Offer a simple, intuitive submission process without requiring users to create or log into a Jira account. A better experience leads to higher quality feedback.
Eliminate Manual Data Entry: Instantly convert every form submission into a structured Jira issue. This frees your team from manually transcribing emails and ensures every request is tracked from the start.
Capture Rich, Actionable Information Upfront: By using smart forms, you can guide users to provide all the necessary information, including file attachments, which dramatically reduces the need for time-consuming follow-up questions.
The heart of your Confluence portal is a form that is both easy for your customers to use and powerful enough to capture the data your team needs.
Build a Form for Clarity, Not Complexity:
Using the drag-and-drop builder in Smart Forms for Jira, you can create a clean and logical layout. Start with essential elements like Single-line text input
for the request summary and Multi-line text input
for a detailed description.
Empower Users to Categorize Their Own Requests:
To ensure requests are routed correctly from the moment they're submitted, add a Dropdown
or Radio buttons
element to your form. You can label this "What is this request about?".
This is where the magic happens: In the element’s settings, use the "Populate options from the issue field" feature. Configure it to pull values from the Issue Type
field in your target Jira project. Now, your customers will see a simple list (e.g., "Bug Report," "Feature Request," "General Question"), and their choice will automatically determine the kind of issue created in Jira.
Enable Rich Context with File Attachments:
Add an Attachment
field to your form. This is invaluable for collecting crucial context that words alone can't provide. Users can upload screenshots of an error, logs for a technical issue, or mockups for a feature idea. This single feature can eliminate days of back-and-forth communication and help your team resolve issues faster. Smart Forms supports multiple uploads per form.
With the form built, the next step is to create an automated bridge between your Confluence portal and your Jira project.
Automate Jira Issue Creation:
In the form's Settings tab, enable the "Create a new issue" feature. This is the engine of your portal.
In the configuration, map your form fields directly to Jira fields. More importantly, for the Issue Type field in the setup, select the dynamic dropdown you created in the previous step. This ensures that a "Bug Report" submission creates a "Bug" issue, and a "Feature Request" creates a "Feature Request" issue, with no manual triage needed.
Enable Open, Anonymous Access:
To make your portal truly public, activate the "Share form externally" option in the form's settings. This generates a single, shareable URL.
This feature is designed for broad access, allowing for unlimited submissions from users without a Jira account and with no expiration date. Copy this link for the final step.
Now you can bring everything together on a public Confluence page that serves as your new customer-facing portal.
Embed Your Form for a Seamless Experience:
On a public Confluence page, use the iframe
macro to embed your form. Paste the external share link you just copied into the iframe's URL field. This places your fully interactive form directly within your branded Confluence environment.
Publish Your Portal to the World:
Ensure your Confluence space permissions are set to allow public or anonymous viewing.
When you publish the page, you are launching more than just a form; you are creating a frictionless channel for communication. You've replaced a chaotic email inbox with a streamlined system that delivers structured, actionable data directly into your team's workflow.
Now that you've seen how to turn a simple Confluence page into a powerful and automated portal, consider what other processes you can streamline. The principles of making it easy for users to submit information and automating the path that data takes into your Jira workflows can be applied to nearly any business need - from project feedback to partner onboarding.
Olha Yevdokymova_SaaSJet
Product Marketing Manager
SaaSJet
Ukraine
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