Confluence connector

The Confluence connector keeps the knowledge base in step with your Confluence wiki: you enter the wiki address, an account and an access token, tick the spaces, and from then on new and changed pages arrive once a day while deleted ones disappear. You edit these articles in Confluence; in the panel they can only be switched on or off.

Before you start

• The wiki must open from the internet: Confluence Cloud (an address like acme.atlassian.net) or your own Confluence server with a public address. A wiki reachable only inside your company network cannot be connected; write to support@epavdesk.com if that is your case.
• The bot answers everyone who sees the chat. If the chat is on an open website, connect only spaces your customers may read. Safest of all is a separate Confluence account that can only read those spaces.
• Connecting a wiki needs the Manage AI features permission.

Create an access token

Confluence Cloud. In your Atlassian account, open Security and then API tokens; the connection form has a Create a Confluence Cloud token link that leads there. An Atlassian token lives a year at most. You enter it together with the e-mail of the account that created it. A token with scopes, for example one of an Atlassian service account, works too if it can read the spaces.

Your own server (Data Center). In your Confluence profile, create a personal access token, and leave Email or username empty when you connect. If your server has no personal access tokens, enter a username in Email or username and that account's password in Access token.

Connect the wiki

1. Open Admin > AI > Knowledge base, press Add knowledge and switch to the Confluence tab.
2. In Wiki address, enter the address starting with https://, for example https://acme.atlassian.net or https://wiki.example.com/confluence. You may paste the address of any wiki page: the page part is cut off. On your own server the path of the wiki itself, such as /confluence, stays.
3. Fill in Email or username and Access token, then press Check.
4. Under Spaces, tick the spaces the bot may answer from. Personal spaces are not offered. Below the list you see how many pages will come in, for example "Pages to import: 240".
5. Press Connect. It becomes available after a successful Check with at least one space ticked. The window closes and the first update starts right away.

What happens on each update

• The connector reads the list of pages in the chosen spaces, downloads only the pages that are new or changed since the last update, and removes the articles of pages deleted from Confluence. Each page becomes one article.
• Only pages are imported. Blog posts, comments and files attached to pages are not.
• Updates run by themselves, about 24 hours after the previous one. Update now runs one immediately.
• Page text is taken the way Confluence displays it, with macros already expanded. A page with almost no text (fewer than 40 characters), such as one that only lists its child pages or holds a single picture, gives no article, and a page that loses its text loses its article.
• When we improve how pages are read, the next update reads all pages again, including those that did not change. You do not need to do anything.

The Connected wikis block above the article list shows each wiki with its spaces and its state: "Updating…" during an update, then the time of the last update and the number of pages in the knowledge base. When the last update changed something, a line such as "Last update: added 12, updated 3, removed 1." follows. Before the first update the block says "Waiting for the first update".

Tables

Tables in Confluence pages stay tables. The first row gives the column names, the bot reads each row together with them, and a long table is split between rows.

Links to Confluence pages

When a customer asks for a link, the bot gives the address of the page in Confluence that its answer came from.

Articles are edited in Confluence

• In the article list these articles carry the Confluence label.
• When you open one, the title and text are locked: change the page in Confluence, and the next update brings the change in. Here you can only turn Enabled off so the bot stops using the article, and it stays off after later updates.
• These articles have no Delete in the row menu, because the next update would bring them back. To drop a whole space, untick it in the connection.
• Your own AI connected through Connect your AI cannot overwrite them either.

Change spaces or the token

Press Change in the Connected wikis block:

• The wiki address cannot be changed. For another wiki, disconnect this one and connect the new one.
• Leave Access token empty to keep the current token, or paste a new one, for example when the old one expired. Email or username can be changed here too.
• The spaces load by themselves with the saved token. After you paste a new token or change Email or username, press Check again.
• Adjust the ticked spaces and press Save.

Saving starts an update right away: articles from spaces you unticked are removed, and pages from newly ticked spaces come in. The token is stored encrypted and is never shown again.

Protection against mass deletion

• If more than a fifth of the pages, and more than five, disappear from Confluence at once, the update keeps all their articles and removes none of them. This usually means the account lost access, not that someone cleaned up the wiki. The block then says how many pages went missing and shows a Remove the missing pages button: press it only if the pages were really deleted.
• A space that could not be read, because it was deleted or the account lost access, is left as it is, and the block names it.
• When Confluence stops accepting the token, the update stops and all articles stay. Press Change and paste a new token.

Disconnect a wiki

Press Disconnect in the Connected wikis block. The knowledge base stops updating from that wiki. Tick Also remove its articles from the knowledge base to delete its articles as well; otherwise they stay as ordinary articles you can edit, with the Synced label.

Troubleshooting

Limits

• Up to 100 spaces and 5,000 pages per connection.
• A page larger than 5 MB is not imported and is counted among the pages that could not be imported.
• One connection per wiki.
• When Confluence asks to slow down, the connector waits and tries again.

Confluence Cloud and your own server

Everything else (daily updates, tables, locked articles, the deletion guard) works the same way for both.

Chat inside Confluence

The chat itself can also run inside Confluence, for signed-in employees. That is set up separately: see Chat inside Confluence.