| Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends |
| July 3, 2023 | July 3, 2023 | July 7, 2023 |
Secure end-user experience integrations for help center allow Zendesk customers to build rich end-user experiences directly integrated with third-party systems.
This announcement includes the following topics:
What is changing?
We are introducing two REST API endpoints that let you make secure client-side requests to third-party APIs.
For more details see:
- Making third-party API requests with help center JWTs developer documentation
- Help Center JWTs API reference
- Tutorial: Building a help center integration
Why is Zendesk making this change?
Until now it has not been possible to leverage help center’s powerful client-side scripting environment, the help center theme, to securely integrate third-party services in the help center end-user experience.
With secure end-user experience integrations for help center, you can now make your help center the one-stop shop for all your end users’ self-service needs.
This allows for many interesting use cases. For example:
- With a Zendesk partner service like AssetSonar by EZO, you can get an IT service catalog in your help center where your employees can see their current IT assets, report issues, or provision new IT assets.
- You can integrate data from your HR, finance, and learning management systems into help center to create a 360-degree employee experience portal.
- If you use a third-party search provider, like Coveo, you can now securely have restricted content hosted on any service show up in search results for only the user that should see it.
You probably have other use cases for integrating with services in your IT service portfolio. Please share a short description in the comments and inspire others.
What do I need to do?
The API will be available to all customers on Guide Enterprise and Suite Enterprise following the full rollout.
If you don’t have your own developer resources, we recommend that you team up with one of our trusted partners or contact our professional services team.
10 Comments
Hi Zendesk,
This is a very interesting announcement! It will open up the doors for some great use cases.
I also always love it when Zendesk goes that extra 5 degrees for the full experience! ;)
Lol :D that's the differentiator ;)
Thank's for catching that Tim Hartzuiker (pluscloud - Premier Zendesk Partner) :)
Hey Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen, will this be added to the API Reference changelog?
Rafael Santos yes, it will :)
It's a great solution and something we were sorely looking for. However, I get a 401 error when I try using it as an 'anonymous' user. We wanted a way to confirm that the call to the third party service came from our Zendesk helpcenter instance regardless of whether the user was logged or not.
Hello Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen,
This is really amazing. It can be even greater with an option to use account-specific secret key (messaging key) to sign the token rather than a generic Zendesk key.
The use case is an almost-out-of-the-box messaging authentication within Guide.
Ahmed Zaid Thank you for your feedback!
We are evaluating the option of adding the ability to determine your own secret.
Do you have other use cases in mind than messaging integration in the Help center?
Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen,
I am mainly interested in messaging authentication so I thought this feature could help in the help center at least. Thank you for looking into it.
I have created a ticket in Support to further assist you regarding the 401 error, someone from Support team will contact you via email, so kindly check your inbox.
Hi Christine, thank you!
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