What Are the Advantages Of Using Scroll Viewport Over Jira Service Management (JSM) Knowledgebase?

Learn about the advantages of using Scroll Viewport over Jira Service Management’s knowledgebase solution.

What is JSM’s Knowledgebase Solution?

Atlassian lets you use Jira Service Management (JSM) in combination with Confluence, so you can create a knowledgebase to support and help your customer. This integration promises to save your team time and improve the customer experience by surfacing the information your customers or employees need to quickly resolve their issue fast.

In this solution, Confluence is where you centralize and organize all customer-facing (or employee-facing) help content. Once you link your Jira service desk project to a space (knowledge base) in Confluence, the articles you publish in Confluence will automatically display in your service desk's customer portal. This is the same place where your customers raise their support tickets.

Advantages of Scroll Viewport over JSM’s Knowledgebase

No content limitation: With Scroll Viewport, you can select to publish as many Confluence spaces as you like to a site. With JSM you can only link up to 10 spaces.
A real custom domain: With Scroll Viewport, you can connect your site to a succinct subdomain like help.acme.com. With JSM, your customer portal can only be connected to a domain in the format get.help.acme.com.
Easy navigation and search: Scroll Viewport respects the page organization you have in your Confluence spaces, reflecting the same page hierarchy and order. Users can drill into parent pages to explore topics and dig deeper into content using navigational elements such as page trees, breadcrumbs child items macros, and table of contents.
JSM, on the other hand, lists out all your content in a flat hierarchy and once in a topic, you have no way to navigate to related, subsequent or higher-level pages, except by using breadcrumbs.
Effective deflection of support tickets: JSM’s knowledgebase is accessed from your JSM customer portal where the main call to action for your users is to raise support tickets. In that sense, raising support tickets is always the primary offer and center of a customer portal and searching through content is presented as a secondary or complementary option.
Scroll Viewport turns this around and places full emphasis on the self-help experience, letting users search for answers in your content first. While you can still let users raise support tickets by connecting a JSM widget or linking to your support portal from the header, ticket creation is always presented as a secondary offer in a Scroll help center site.
Accessibility of the site: Scroll Viewport’s help center theme has been optimized for accessibility and has been matched against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 guidelines. We outperform JSM customer portals in this regard.
More info on Are Viewport Sites Accessible? Our Accessibility Statement
Manage version, translations and conditional content: Scroll Viewport is part of a modular ‘Scroll’ solution. It can be enhanced with our content management app Scroll Documents which will allow you to published versioned, translated and conditionalized content. JSM, on the other hand, lacks all of these options.
on Display Versions, Display Variants and Create a Multilingual Help Center

How To Best Replace or Enhance A JSM Portal with A Scroll Viewport Site?

While using Jira Service Management’s Knowledgebase places the primary focus on support ticket creation, using Scroll Viewport emphasizes a content-first and self-service approach.

Using Scroll Viewport, the center of the experience is a help center site, where users can search for information using a fully featured navigation and search before resorting to ticket creation.

To create a complete help experience, when using Scroll Viewport in combination with JSM’s customer portals, we recommend the following:

Enable the JSM widget to let your users raise support tickets right from the comfort of your Scroll help center site.
Link to your JSM customer portal from the site’s header, so users can easily find their way to your support portal.
Unlink your knowledgebase from JSM. Since your Confluence content is now exposed with Scroll Viewport, there’s no need to make your content appear in your JSM portal.
Add a short cut to your Scroll site from ‘Additional resources’ in JSM. In your customer portal, add a link to your Scroll help center site, so users are encouraged to check out your help content before submitting a support ticket.