How to effectively search and access the Jira documentation

[Danielle Green]

I'm having problems navigating around the documentation for Jira (and Confluence), for my work as well as well as studying for the ACP-100. I'm directed to read the Atlassian documentation on each subject, but cannot find what I'm looking for, eg a search on indexing returns irrelevant answers. The navigation is very confusing to me. What am I missing? I don't need a generic link, I need to know how to find the subjects I'm looking for. Thank you.

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi Danielle,

this is no so much an answer as it is an affirmation that indeed the documentation search is less than ideal at times. I generally have to perform multiple searches and come through a number of results to finally find what I seek. You might try Google when you don’t find the answer directly as I find their search algorithms better and it hits the broader internet.

[Danielle Green]

Thank you - it is really helpful to know that it's not just me! I am somewhat surprised that Atlassian are unable to make their own knowledge base user friendly on Confluence...

[Joanna Thurmann]

@Danielle Green I empathize with your predicament.  Jira is a rich product, hence a lot of documentation, hence it's hard to know where to start. 

I find it easiest to go to the main documentation for a particular release which I have, am using, etc. For example:  

Jira Software Server 7.6 documentation

Then I search for narrow keywords, especially ones that appear in the actual menus/configurations i.e. "background re-index".  The 3rd article will be this one, which gives an overview of the indexing process and links to more.

Understand the index process in Jira server - Atlassian Documentation

I hope that starting in the main doc set, then using narrow, UI-specific keywords will help you get to the "starting point" on any given feature, from where you can dig deeper.