Using Confluence as an external knowledge source for help center search

With the Knowledge connector, you can now connect external content sources to your Zendesk help center and make them available for help center search. With this EAP, you can configure your Confluence site as an external search source, which makes your site and space content available to appear in help center search results. Logged in users performing searches in your help center can access your Confluence content directly from the search results page. 

You can add and remove Confluence spaces at any time to specify the content that you want to include in search.

You must be a Guide admin to set up and manage Knowledge connectors.

Note: Future development work will enable you to use the Confluence Connector as an external source for AI agents and Copilot. However, this EAP is limited to using the Confluence Connector as a source for generative search and help center search.

Setting up the Knowledge connector

You can set up the Knowledge connector to ingest and sync content from your Confluence spaces.

To set up the Knowledge connector

1. In Knowledge admin, click the Manage articles  icon in the sidebar.
2. Under External content, click Connections.
3. Under Available sources, click Connect on the Confluence card.
   
4. Log into Atlassian, then select your Confluence site from the drop-down list and click Accept.
   
5. On the Sync content from Confluence modal, select the Confluence site and related spaces that you want to connect to Knowledge. 
   When you select a space, the space tag is added to the selection bar. To remove the space, click X on the space tag.
   
6. Click Sync to begin syncing your site to Knowledge. 
   The Connection page opens to show the spaces and their syncing status.
   
7. When the sync is complete, the page will show a green Synced status for each synced space.
   
8. To include Confluence content in your help center search results, continue to the next section to add Confluence as an external search source.

Including Confluence content in your search results

You must add Confluence as an external search source for your help center in order for the content to appear in search results. To include Confluence content in your help center search results, see Including external content in your help center search results.

As a participant in this EAP, you’ll see your Confluence spaces listed as an external search source. You can use the Manage search sources view to select the spaces that you want to include in your search results.

When you configure Confluence as an external search source,the help center search results page lists Confluence Page as a search type, and then displays the relevant results in the search results pane. 

Logged in users can click the search result to open the linked Confluence page in a new browser tab. Confluence pages are not visible to anonymous (public) users.

Managing the Knowledge connector

You can manage external Knowledge connections in order to force a sync, remove the connection, or manage the existing Confluence connection.

Manually syncing the connection

When you enable Confluence as a search source, Knowledge syncs with your Confluence site every 12 hours to update new or changed content. You can manually force a sync whenever you want to update Knowledge with changes from your Confluence site and spaces.

To manually sync the connection

1. On the Connections page, under the Confluence connection click the options menu icon on the right side of the space row.
   
2. Select Sync again.
   The Confluence spaces sync immediately, and the Last synced column is updated with the most recent sync time.

Managing the connection

You can manage the connection to view information about the Confluence connection. Future development will add further functionality to this option.

To manage the connection

• On the Connections page, under the Confluence connection click the options menu icon on the right side of the space header. A panel opens with connection and status information for the selected space.
  
• To close the panel, click X on the right side of the title bar.

Removing the connection

Removing the connection deletes all synced content from Confluence. Your original content in Confluence isn’t affected.

To remove the connection

1. On the Connections page, under the Confluence connection, click the options menu on the right side of the space row.
   
2. Select Remove connection.
3. In the Remove connection modal, review the message, then click Remove connection.
   The space is removed from the Connection list, and is no longer available as a search source.