Access to linked knowledge base for Jira Service Desk customers

[Alok Bhargava]

Hello,

My setup:

• We use JIRA in the Cloud.
• I have a Jira Service Desk (JSD) project "CSA" setup for Customer A.
• I have added Employees of Customer A as Customers for CSA, using their work email addresses.
• Access to CSA is granted via request i.e. the project is not open to the public.
• I have linked a Confluence knowledge base "CSA_KB" with CSA.
• I have added a link to CSA_KB to the CSA request page announcement.
• I have configured the CSA pages with the restriction such that "Everyone" can View (and not Edit) as I would like CSA Customers to be able to read the KB articles but not edit them (I am hoping they can still leave comments).

My problem:  my customers cannot access CSA_KB: we always get the message: "There was a problem contacting the application".

I have tried googling and thought the requirement for restricting access to a Confluence KB linked to a JSD to the JSD customers (in addition to the JSD admins and agents) only had been solved.

I would appreciate any guidance.

Thanks!

[Alok Bhargava · Accepted solution]

I found the solution:

JSD Project settings > Knowledge base > Access > and select

Everyone with access to your service desk can read articles without a Confluence license. This option is best if you want to share knowledge base articles with your customers.

[Craig Doran]

Hi Aloka.  Do you know if its possible to give a customer access to the FULL knowledge base (i.e. index, search, ect).  The above solution gives them access to the pop up knowledge bases articles but not the FULL knowldge page with the index tree and other full pages where they can view images , expand window ect.  Do you know if this is possible without given someone a confluence licence

[Alok Bhargava]

Hi Craig,

Atlassian's support to provide access to a Confluence space for unlicensed users has complexities that I have not fully understood.  I am not even sure that the Cloud deployment supports a solution.

That said here is the experience that my customers have.

• They can log into my company's Atlassian Cloud server and are presented with a page that provides them access to a set of portals for which they have permissions.
• I have setup a single portal for them with an associated KB.
• My customers cannot directly access a KB page - they have to go through the portal (tickets or otherwise); so I added a link in the portal landing page to the top-level KB page. This page includes links to the articles.
• I added a search box to the KB page but a search query does not work as clicking on a result takes the customer back to some login page again.

So my solution is to always provide the customer with explicit instructions for getting to a KB article.  This will clearly not scale with time but I have punted on the issue for now.

I wish I could have helped some more but this is where I am.

Alok