Help Center and Portal setup

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello all,

I would like to achieve the following:

• Open Help Center where external customers can browse our knowledge base articles  (hosted in Confluence) and educate themselves on the product
• A chatbot hosted on the help center, trained with the knowledge base articles
• A closed portal where external customers can submit a request to our service desk
• Knowledge Base integration in Jira Service Management
• Atlassian AI training with the knowledge base articles, submitted requests and answers given

Currently, we are using Refined to provide the open knowledge base, and are linking customers to the closed default portal. This is giving us the functionality that we are looking for, but also introduces some issues with ticket handling.

For example, we cannot link knowledge base articles directly from JSM since the URL used is not the same as the Refined portal. 

With the new customization options in the Atlassian Help Center, we were hoping migrate back to a full Atlassian native stack but it seems impossible to open up the help center while having a closed portal.

Do you know how this might be achieved? How are you using the knowledge base features in combination with the portal?

I also haven't found a way to overwrite the default Atlassian URL's with a custom URL, this would perhaps solve some of the issues. I am not sure if this is something that might be solved by using Refined or perhaps K15T?

Curious to hear your thoughts!

[Lotje Euser]

hey @Paul Wiggers 

Lotje here from the Refined team. 

Around your requirements I'd like to add in some comments:

• Open Help Center where external customers can browse our knowledge base articles  (hosted in Confluence) and educate themselves on the product -> I think you already have this in place, correct?
• A chatbot hosted on the help center, trained with the knowledge base articles -> this is possible with Refined, did you manage to make it work?
• A closed portal where external customers can submit a request to our service desk-> this is possible by directly adding your JSM projects in the site structure, did you manage to achieve this?
• Knowledge Base integration in Jira Service Management -> yes customers will see KB suggestions when filling in the summary field
• Atlassian AI training with the knowledge base articles, submitted requests and answers given -> should be possible but this is on Atlassian side. As long as the pages are then added into the same space(s) that are on the Refined site
  

I would love to further dive in with you about making the most out of our app, I have some ideas for you.

lotje.euser@refined.com is my email address. Would you be open to further discussing these topics?

Kind regards,
Lotje

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello @Lotje Euser ,

Thanks for replying. We are currently using Refined and have managed most of what we want. Just the integration with JSM itself so that our agents can work more effectively is posing an issue.

Going through the points:

• Open knowledge base is achieved with Refined. We link to the original (closed) Atlassian portal to allow the creation of tickets. If there is a better way, I am happy to hear it.
• We do have a chatbot in place on the Refined site. We are currently using Unless and the activation is done through a code snippet. The chatbot is linked to the same Confluence spaces as the Knowledge Base.
• The closed Portal is now linking to the orginal Atlassian portal but it seems that there is a better way.
• The KB integration I am also looking for has to do with the agent side of JSM. Currently, when they link a KBA, it is using the *.atlassian.net URL which differs from our custom domain that we are using for the Refined site.

I will send you an e-mail tomorrow when I get back at work. Going by your name, can I send it in Dutch?

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Paul Wiggers 

Is there no JSM project visible on the portal?

If you have one you can now customise the portal with rich text content, perhaps link to the Confluence KB page.

To use native KB features a project needs to be visible on the JSM portal.

A KB is linked to the JSM project not the portal.

You can update the url of the cloud domain, se can-i-change-the-url-used-to-access-a-product 

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello @Marc - Devoteam ,

Thank you for replying but this is not exactly what I mean. Let me try to explain it further.

Currently, it is not possible to have an open help center where you can host your knowledge base and a closed portal to receive customer requests at the same time. They either have to be both open or closed.

What do I mean with open and closed? Open is for anonymous access. Customers should be able to go to our knowledge base and browse our articles without having to log in. 

Closed refers to being behind a login. In this case, I want customers to log in, in order to submit a request. 

As far as I know, this scenario is not possible with out of the box Atlassian products. We therefor had to revert to using other products (Refined) to host our knowledge base.

The Refined knowledge base is running on a custom domain. Since it is a custom domain, we cannot link knowledge base articles directly from with Jira Service Management since those are still using the *.atlassian.net URL instead of the URL of our custom domain. While this is a minor nuisance (we just have to go to our custom domain, search the article there, and paste the correct link), it would save some time if we could do that directly from within JSM. 

I have taken a look at the article about changing the JSM domain but it seems that this will conflict with the custom domain that is already being used by the Refined site. It also doesn't provide a solution for the open and closed question.

If you have a solution for that, I am happy to hear it.

Thanks in advance!

Paul

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Paul Wiggers 

For open and closed, you should then have 2 separate JSM projects.

But if you want to use the same KB for both projects, then indeed this is not possible.

For the domain issues, this can't be fixed either as the refined domain is of course not manageable.

And you can't have 2 domains with the same name.

Only other option is a workaround via middleware, using a web server in between, where yuo have redirections in place, but still if that would work?

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello @Marc - Devoteam 

It seems that the help center settings are connected to the portal settings. We have tried with multiple portals connected to the same help center (different KB's) but didn't manage to configure it so what we got what we were after.
So, if we want an open portal with a closed portal, we need to setup another site which seems a bit excessive and complicated.

Or perhaps, I am not looking at the correct settings. Do you have an example of an open help center and a closed portal? I have tried quite a few options but haven't been able to get that result.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Paul Wiggers 

Would multiple help centers be option, create-and-manage-help-centers 

This of course if you are on a premium subscription.

[Paul Wiggers]

Unfortunately it is not. The Help Center settings are centralized and cannot be set per Help Center.

It looks like we will have to continue with our current setup. Atlassian seems to be focussing on internal service instead of delivering external service.