In the Service Desk portal, the Knowledge Base is presented as the Help center. Same articles, customer-facing wording, and a deliberately narrower selection.
Signed-in portal users see a Help center link on their My requests page. It opens at:
/portal/<your-portal-slug>/kb
An individual article lives at:
/portal/<your-portal-slug>/kb/<article-slug>
Each customer company has its own portal address. An article shared with three companies is reachable at three different URLs — one per company — which is why the editor confirms an article is Live on your customer portal rather than printing a single link.
Company identity comes from the customer's signed-in session, never from the URL. A customer cannot see another company's articles by editing the address.
Customers must be signed in to the portal to read the Help center. It is not a public, anonymous documentation site.
Only articles that pass every gate:
Everything else is genuinely absent: not in the category tree, not in search results, and the direct URL returns "not found".
Uncategorized articles are grouped under General.
The Help center opens on Browse articles, showing the categories and articles available to that company in the order you curated on the Manage surface. Your arrangement reaches customers — the most important article in a section is the one you put first, not the one that happens to start with "A".
The search box is labelled Search articles, with the placeholder Search the help center…. Results appear under Search results, ranked exactly as they are for your team — exact title matches first, then title-prefix, then title-contains, then body relevance.
Customer-facing messages:
| Situation | What they see |
|---|---|
| Nothing published for them | No articles have been published yet. |
| Search found nothing | No articles match your search. |
| Could not load | We could not load the help center. Please try again. with a Try again button |
| Article failed to load | We could not load this article. Please try again. |
Navigation links read Back to help center and Back to my requests.
The Help center also works to prevent tickets. When a customer is submitting a request, the form searches your published articles as they describe their problem:
This is the highest-value place your Knowledge Base pays for itself. A customer who finds the answer here never files the ticket.
Suggestions match on titles and body text, with titles weighted more heavily. A customer types "can't log in", not "authentication failure remediation". Title your customer-facing articles the way customers describe the problem, and the deflection search will find them.
If your support team keeps answering the same question, that question is a title.
You cannot fully verify the customer experience from the authoring surface, because the Library deliberately shows your team everything.
published and portal. The editor flags it — "No companies selected — this article is not visible to any portal company." — and the Manage table styles the No companies value as a warning. If an article is mysteriously invisible to every customer, check this first.Start with your ticket queue. The articles worth writing first are the answers your team is already typing repeatedly. Look at your most common request subjects and write those.
Put the customer-facing sections first. Category order is yours to set, and customers read top-down.
Use Internal categories for the working half. Keep runbooks, escalation procedures, and internal notes in an Internal section. Your team finds them in the Library alongside everything else; customers never know they exist.
Stage a section before launch. Build a new section under an Internal parent category, get every article right, then flip the parent to Portal. Everything goes live at once, already configured — and if you need to pull it back, flipping it to Internal restores exactly the state you had.