How can I connect a knowledge base, Q&A and Service Desk

[Deleted user]

Hey there everybody,

I just wondered how to get the maximum out of JIRA Service Desk. A little about my organization: we are a nonprofit ORG and we are planning to use Confluence for collaboration and knowledge management. With Q&A we want to enable our org to become a member driven community which means less central answering and more questions answered by members itself.

We want to enable JIRA Service Desk as well for our headquarter to better process questions. So as I understand:

Q&A: place where members can answer other members questions - so probably the first place to look for when a member has a question

Service Desk: opportunity to better proceed and answer questions by the board and our headquarter

Knowledge base: place where pre written and often asked questions can be answered

And now: how can we connect this? For example: if someone wrote a ticket via Service Desk and the employer at our headquarter knows that there is a solution available at the knowledgebase (Q&A). How can he link to it? Do he have to look for it manually and copy the link? I did not find a solution to link directly to that stuff. Only the option to create a new knowledge base article

Since all these options are kinda connected and working on the same goal it would be great to integrate Service Desk. And last question: how can Q&A collaborate with stuff at a knowledgebase?

[RVal]

Confluence Questions serves a bit different purpose then Confluence Knowledge Base. Q&A supposed to collect tribe knowledge where everybody can respond to questions and then people can vote answers up or down. Knowledge Base  on the other hand supposed to be a collection of articles created by service team to respond most frequent issues so customers could use them as a guidance in problem resolution before they submit service ticket.

Current version of Service Desk can be linked with Confluence Knowledge Base but not with Confluence Questions. However Atlassian has plans to add linkage to Questions as well in the future. To add Service Desk link to Confluence KB you need to use Service Desk administration view and select Customer Portal -> Knowledge Base -> Link to a knowledge base. You link to a selected space inside your Confluence. This space is searched from Service Desk customer view for possible issue resolution (search bar in SD customer view). Also while customer is typing a summary to create a new SD request he will see results of KB auto search on the right side of the screen. 

Hope this helps.

[Deleted user]

This is a great answer, thank you RVal! But as I understand: the idea is that the customer searches for existing KB articles. But there is no way provided if the customer fails and there is still an article (the customer just not found). So the agent has to go for it, copy the URL and post in manually in the ticket answer, right?

[RVal]

Confluence search should be able to find article if it contains phrase entered by customer. However if article is not there (or exists in a different space) my understanding is agent can copy/paste URL as a response to this ticket or move article to the linked space or create a new article by clicking Create Article button from within the ticket and enter the information into the searchable space so it is found next time..

[john]

Lars,

Thanks for your question. RVal's answer is correct - you can connect Confluence KnowledgeBase to Service Desk but Confluence Questions is separate.

We have an open feature request here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-361 that you can comment and vote up for integrating Confluence Questions with JIRA Service Desk.

Just to clarify - you want to use Service Desk and Q&A externally, correct? 

Thanks,

John

Product Marketing, Confluence & Confluence Questions

Atlassian