Using Help Desk Portal or Customer Portal but NOT both (Server Based).

[Jonathan Villanueva]

Hello there

We are having a very hard time personalizing the feel an look of our Help Desk portal for our customers, because of the additional alternative of having a Customer Portal. 

Allow me to explain:  We only have one single Service Desk project, and, to my understanding. Jira Service Desk project comes with two different entry points for customers (or external users).

1. The first one being the Help Desk portal that can be customized (very mildly) allowing us the administrators to add a logo, give it a name, a small description or message and also choose the coloring scheme for the buttons and highlighted selections. Again, very mildly customization options compared to the cloud version which unfortunately it seems we can't access.
2. The second entry point is the Customer Portal which seems to be a "child" of the Help Desk portal but can also be customized with a logo, a name and a description. 

Now to the problem we are having:

1. Because the Customer Portal seems to be a child of the Help Desk portal, we constantly see duplicated names or descriptions (since we have a single service desk project) and even when we try to work around that, the whole layout of the customer portal makes it incredibly odd for our users and it just looks poorly designed, unprofessional or not properly thought out. (Mostly because we have a single product name and the service desk jira project was uniquely create for that single product)
2. The additional problem we have is that even if we are to restrict the access to external users, when searching a topic in the search bar of the Help Desk Portal, this only shows related tickets but it doesn't show the confluence help page created for our product. However, if the user is on the Customer Portal" and uses the search option, only then they are able to see the articles and confluence pages we created for our product.

Now for the questions:

1. Is there a way to remove one portal or the other so that our customers only see one single portal (including anonymous users)? Note that we also need to make sure users are able to access the help page documentation from the confluence pages linked to our single service desk project
2. Optionally: Is there a way to change the customization options to use the Cloud version instead of server version? (though this makes me think that the problem might actually remain because even the cloud version comes with a Help Desk Portal and a Customer Portal, both of which need to be configured and will continue to cause conflicts on the customization and access to documentation).
3. Or is there another work around or alternative for this?

In all honestly I can't understand how the Cloud version allows to add an image banner which makes the page looks a lot more professional but the Server version has so much less options for customization.

We are at one week of releasing our product and we can't figure out a way to resolve this.

Please help!

Thank you for your time.

[Genevieve (Refined Partner Manager)]

Hi Jonathan, 

Apologies for the delay on replying to your questions. Cheers for the mention @Fabian Lopez. 

Our app RefinedTheme for Jira Service Desk Server will be able to tackle a lot of your pain points. I'll go through them below and explain how. 

1. Customizability
• Using our app you can apply your team/company design and style with the  inbuilt theme editor (very easy set-up) or use one of our bundled themes. You can also customize the layout on the help center and customer portal using the inbuilt layout editor. Here is an example of our own support site help center (1) and support site customer portal to give you an idea. 
  
  
2. Duplicate names or descriptions displaying when searching in help center 
• In your case, with only one JSD project, using our app you can make the contexts clear so that customers can easily distinguish between the help center and the customer portal. You can do this using both the theme, layout and content modules on both landing pages. Here is a screen grab of what the different contexts could be for you. 
• Help Center View (Click the Product W Support to Navigate to Customer Portal for your Product). 
  Customer Portal/Project View:
  
3. Odd layout on customer portal for users (specifically design and navigation). 
• Configure the layout you want using our layout editor. Use content modules to add quick links to content that matters and improve navigation. Using the the example above, this is how the layout editor view looks. 
• 
  
  
4. On Help Desk search shows related tickets but doesn't show hits for Confluence help pages (KB articles).
• This should work with default JSD. It might be a permissions issue? Depending on which of your users can search for what? 
• Sidenote: You can connect multiple knowledge base articles using RefinedTheme. 
5. Removing either the help desk or customer portal and having one entry point. 
• It's not possible to remove the help desk or customer portal (and have the one entry point) but by having clearer context switching using a design similar to above, your problem should be solved. 

Other things you might be interested in using:

• Recommended Links: Add links to the search from anywhere on the web. 
• View Permissions: Add view permissions to content on your customer portal and help center so that users only see the content that is important to them.
  
  

Please note, this is a short overview of RefinedTheme for Jira Service Desk to help ease some of your pain points. We have a support service (using RefinedTheme for Jira Service Desk of course!) who can answer you directly and help you out.

Hope this helps! 

[Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_]

@Jonathan Villanueva, Hi, I am sure I am not going to  provide the right answer, but I am having similar issues like the one you are describing.

1. Look and Feel

2. Fiendly access to anonymous users (at least to use the KB and send a simple request).

I wrote a couple of blogposts about customization of the look and feel (I use Server) and I selected Refined Theme for Jira Service Desk from RefinedWiki.. to add more "flavor" to the portal. The blog post is here: 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Agile-articles/A-new-theme-for-Jira-Service-Desk-Portal-Warfighter-Made-Part-7/ba-p/696360

(This is for a Non-profit organization that assist US Veterans).

About #2, that is still a blocker for me and I found this week in another post a new add on that I am testing (but still not able to fix the issue when multiple anonymous user access the site). The add on name is: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215570/anonymous-portal-for-jira-service-desk?hosting=server&tab=overview

I was asked why I want to provide anonymous access and why not capturing user information. I am not against that, but I don't like with the first page after a link from our website is a plain page asking to create their account ;(. By having the landing anonymous portal I could capture at least the first submission or open our KB

I hope this help a little bit, I will be watching this page as your case answers will help me a lot.

@[deleted] are you able to provide some insight on this one?

[Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_]

@Genevieve (Refined Partner Manager) I am not sure if Refined Theme could help Jonathan on the elimination of Help Center... You are invited to the discussion ;)

[Jonathan Villanueva]

Hello @Fabian A_ Lopez _Community Leader - Argentina_ Florida_ California_

My biggest concern at this point is the large differences that exist between Cloud version and Server version.

I mean, something as basic as language management for the way the Portals are displayed to users that is only available on cloud version but not on server version.

We have users from all around the world and to have a portal that can only display one single language (ticket forms included) is rather unprofessional and doesn't help the branding of our product.

One more thing that I find incredibly disappointing is the Widget access cloud version provides that again, doesn't come with sever version. I suppose it is understandable that having a web based version makes it easier to have a widget enabled but tools like Zendesk even at the lowest price offer some sort of widget enabled options. 

I do appreciate though your help and insight about this matter.

Thank you very much.