The first step is to create an application link between Jira and Confluence. You can refer to the Integrating Jira with Confluence recipe in Chapter 7, Integrations with Jira, for detailed information. If you have already integrated Jira and Confluence, you can skip these steps:

1. Browse to the service desk that you want to set up a knowledge base for.
2. Click on the Project settings option in the lower-left corner of the screen.
3. Select the Knowledge base option from the panel on the left-hand side.

4. Click on the Set up a link to Confluence link. If you do not see the following screenshot, then you have already integrated Jira with Confluence, and you can skip this section:

5. Enter the fully qualified URL for your Confluence instance, and click on the Create new link button.
6. Follow the onscreen wizard and complete the setup process.

With the application link in place, we can now go back to the service desk. You should now see the options to link the service desk to a Confluence space.

To set up a Confluence space as a knowledge base for your service desk, perform the following steps:

1. Select the Link to a Confluence space option.
2. Select the linked Confluence application from the Application drop-down list.
3. Select the space that will become the knowledge base for your service desk. If no space is designated at this point, you can click on the Create a knowledge base space link to create a new space on the fly:

4. Click on the Link button after you have selected or created your knowledge base Confluence space.

The last step is to configure the knowledge base access controls so that autosearching the portal will return results. If both Jira Service Desk and Confluence are connected to the same user repository, such as an LDAP, then they should have the same user accounts. Make sure you grant end users read access to the knowledge base space and give page access to your agents.

Once you have set up a knowledge base, there will be a new section called Related knowledge base articles for the agent's view. An agent can create a new knowledge base article by performing the following steps:

1. Click on the create an article link:

2. Enter the title for the new article, select a label, and then select the template to use for the article's content.

3. Click on the Create button. This will take you to the article in Confluence, which will be prepopulated, based on the selected template. You can edit the content and publish it when ready:

It's now time to see how these steps work.