My service desk customers cannot access knowledge base
Asked by Peter Kaiser _Admin_:

Setup:

* Jira (software and service desk) Server installation
* Confluence server installation
* Established application link in both directions
* No "user sharing" from jira to confluence

Steps:

1. Created service desk project
2. Matching knowledge base space in confluence was created from service desk
3. Created some articles in KB space
4. Set knowledge base access in service desk project to "all active ..."
5. Invited customer

Problem:

When I log in as agent I can search (from service desk) and find the KB articles and can open them in a popup in jira service desk (and copy the link).

When I log in as a customer I can create tickets as expected in the service desk project. But when I search for KB articles none are found. If I access the copied link I get an article not found message.

Documentation states that the customer should be able to search and display the KB articles in this szenario. All articles, discussions, questions I can find have different problems.


Answers:
author: Jeremy Uffens
body: I had the same issue with my Jira SD Cloud and Confluence Cloud. The issue was that I had some view/edit restrictions on the main page for the confluence site linked that was liked to the service desk knowledge base. After removing any view/edit restrictions so that anyone can view and edit, the how-to articles/knowledge base pages were once again searchable by my Jira Service Desk organization users. Since my JSD organization users are not named confluence users they can't edit the pages anyway as the "anyone can view/edit" refers to the named confluence users (that have a license)


author: Tom De Coninck
body: Hello,

We bought a license for JSD and Confluence and are testing the integration with a confuence KB.

After 3 days of trying and debugging.. it still doesn't work. Even if the applications show that everything is linked and working.

Unfortunately, i cannot find relevent documentation about this. We give up

This integration was the main reason we choose JSD + Confluence in the first place.

We will probably choose another product not from atlassian.

It's sad that Atlassian is not listening to its customers, or providing better integration/documentation.

Kind Regards,

Tom

comments: author: Tom De Coninck
body: Hi Again,

10 minutes after writing my post i did find the solution.

You have to configure Confluence to use the same userbase as Jira or Crowd. I did use the jira userbase

This is the link , i hope it helps someone

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/connecting-to-crowd-or-jira-for-user-management-229838465.html>


author: Holger Lehmann [catworkx GmbH]
body: Please check out my post in the other thread:

<https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Re-My-service-desk-customers-cannot-access-knowledge-base/qaq-p/1130949/comment-id/148192#M148192>

Cheers, Holger


author: Thomas B
body: The Confluence Knowledge Base needs to have correct permissions set in place so 'anonymous' users can access the information through JIRA Service Desk.

1. Go to your Knowledge Base \> Space tools \> Permissions
2. Scroll down to "Anonymous Access" and click "Edit Permissions"
3. **Only select the option** for anonymous users to View the information (unless you want them to have more access than just viewing articles)

Hope this is helpful and if you have any other questions, let us know!

comments: author: Peter Kaiser _Admin_
body: I don't think so. If you have to enable anonymous access to the knowledge base then why is there at the top of the permissions a special entry "All active users ... this was activated by service desk ..." (translated by me from german). It doesn't make any sense that jira service desk activates some super special kind of permission if you have to allow anonymous access anyway.

Also in service desk under knowledge base it is stated that all customers have access, even without confluence license. If it were needed to enable anonymous access to achieve this, service desk would have done it when creating the KB space inconfluence.

And by the way, if showing the knowledge base article is done in a popup in jira, why is access of the user to cinfluence even needed? Jira can (and seemingly does) pull the content via the application link and show it without ever handing the user over to confluence.


author: Jose Q
body: I agree, I'm having the exact same issue and I cannot get any customer to access the Knowledgebase without making the access anonymous, which I would like not to do.

That is the exact goal of have customers and authentication for them. It's very hard to search for this subject and find a precise answer...


Tags: confluence-server

jira-service-desk

jira-service-desk-server

server