The knowledge base search does not return any result from the Customer Portal for specific users only

Summary

After connecting setting up a Knowledge Base for your service project, customers should be able to search for articles from the Customer Portal in three locations locations: the help center home page, within a specific project portal or when creating a new request. However, in some cases, the search won't return any articles for specific users.

If the search is not working at all in any of these 3 places, and only impacts some of the Jira users, then this knowledge base article might be relevant as it provides a possible root cause for this situation.

However, if the issue impacts all Jira users, then this other KB article might be more relevant: The knowledge base search does not return any result from the Customer Portal for any user.

Environment

Any Jira Service Management Data Center version 3.x and 4.x with an application link to any Confluence Data Center version.

Diagnosis

Diagnosis for Root Cause 1

• The Confluence application is up and running, and is reachable by the Jira application

• The search works for some users (it returns results), but not for other users (no results are returned)

• The Confluence application is not configured with Anonymous access (via the page ⚙ > Global Permissions):

  

• When searching for impacted users in the Confluence user base (via the page ⚙ > User Management), no result is returned:

  

Diagnosis for Root Cause 2

• The Confluence application is up and running, and is reachable by the Jira application

• The search works for some users (it returns results), but not for other users (no results are returned)

• When viewing an example of page that cannot be found on the customer portal directly in Confluence, we can see that this page has some restriction, allowing only certain users (or group of users) to view this page:

  
  

Root Cause

Root Cause 1

As per the documentation Set up a knowledge base with Confluence Data Center, when configuring the knowledge base integration between Jira and Confluence, you will need to make sure that users (including Service Management Customers) exist in both Jira and Confluence.

If Confluence is not public (no anonymous access) and if a Jira user does not exist in the Confluence application, then this user will not be able to perform any KB search from the Customer Portal (no result will be shown).

Root Cause 2

The page(s) that cannot be found on customer portal were configured with some restrictions on the Confluence side, or the parent page of this/these page(s) has some restriction.

Solution

Solution for Root Cause 1

Option 1

As explained in the documentation Set up a knowledge base with Confluence Data Center, make sure that users (including Service Management Customers) exist in both Jira and Confluence by using of one of the following approaches:

• Have the same user base in both Jira & Confluence e.g. both Jira and Confluence integrated with the same external directory. Briefly speaking, each Service Management customer has a user account in both Jira and Confluence but not consuming any licenses.

  • You can also accomplish this by using Jira as a user directory for Confluence or by having Jira Service Management and Confluence use Crowd to share a user base.

  • Use the connector directory instead of delegated authentication for LDAP or AD. Otherwise, the customers will have to log in to Confluence at least once to have the account created before they can search and view a KB from the Portal. Using connector will allow all users to be created and synced in the application.

• Manually create a user in Confluence for every customer in JSD that will need access to the Knowledge Base. You can create a "customer" account in Confluence by not assigning it to a group. This will not count against your Confluence license.

Option 2

Alternatively, you can configure the entire Confluence application with anonymous access as per Setting up public access. With such configuration, it will no longer be required for customers to have an account in the Confluence application.

Solution for Root Cause 2

Remove the restriction from the impacted page(s) and or their parent page, to enable any user to access them.