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Guide Public and Private Content

  • May 22, 2019
  • 5 replies
  • 0 views
L

We want to have Public and Private content. For the Public content we do not want any sign-in (we want users to be able to scan QR codes that link them directly to our product installation manuals without a sign-in step). The rest of our content we want to require users to sign-in.

I see under Settings/Security the tick box to enable/disable Require Sign-in. But that is a Global setting for the whole site. Right now we have this enabled (requires sign-in).

How do we create a mix of Public (no sign in) and Private (sign in) content? 

- With the whole site Security set for "Require Sign-in" I tried to set an individual article to "Everyone" and the user still had to sign in.

- Do we need to make the whole site Public (Sign-in not required) and then define whether each article requires sign in? Or is there another way to do this?

Thanks

 

 

 

    5 replies

    Nicole17
    • Nicole17
    • May 24, 2019

    Hey Larry -

    Great question. It's the latter of your two thoughts:

    What you'll want to do is disable Require Sign-in.

    Then, for the content you want users to sign in for, you'll want to set the visibility to signed-in users.

    Any content that is set as visible to: Everyone will be visible to anyone without requiring a log in.

    I hope that helps; let us know if you have additional questions!

    M
    • Mike123
    • September 10, 2019

    Hi Nicole!

     

    I'm trying to solve something similar - we would like to have the majority of our Guide content behind login, but there are a few articles that need to be public, but I'm running into a challenge with implementation.

    Use case: Only registered users of our SaaS product have access to the full Help Centre. There's a 'Getting Started' area which is public, as it contains information on configuration steps for IT (who typically would not become a user).

    We would *like* to implement SSO, so that users who are logged into the product can access the HC via a link and be automatically served the full Guide experience. However, due to the Public section, we can't do this. The result is that following a link from the product to the HC presents a user with the public landing page (with a lone Getting Started section) and no obvious way to be aware that they need to sign in.

    I've been digging around and trying to find any resources or guidance, but haven't found any use cases that are quite the same. I'm considering just moving the Getting Started docs to a section of the corporate site, but we are localizing for a global audience and that would be a silo'd area to maintain away from the core Help Center.

    Any suggestions or guidance on this would be appreciated.

    Brett13
    • Brett13
    • Community Manager
    • September 13, 2019

    Hey Mike,

    Have you had a chance to look at the available SSO options article we have? Assuming you've set up SSO on your Zendesk account, users should be able to log into your product and automatically be authenticated when navigating to your Help Center.

    Let me know if I'm misunderstanding the issue you're running into.

    Thanks!

    M
    • Mike123
    • September 13, 2019

    Hi Brett,

    The issue that I'm facing is with SSO enabled, it's not possible to have a mix of public/private articles - the entire HC is behind the sign-in page.

    We have an area of the HC containing implementation guides that are required to be public, as the customer base who will be accessing these would not be registered users of the product.

    If I disable SSO, then the public/private article functionality works as expected, but users who have logged into our product and followed the link to the HC are required to log in again, which isn't easy to infer from the page (they would have to notice that several private sections are not visible, and that it says 'SIGN IN' on the top banner.

    Brett13
    • Brett13
    • Community Manager
    • September 13, 2019

    Hey Mike,

    Thanks for the additional information. I would think you could have SSO enabled but then disable the Require sign-in option under your Guide settings. That way users are not required to sign in to view the public content. 

    For the content that should be private, you could use user segments to restrict access to those logged in users that may have a certain tag associated with their account or if they're part of a specific organization. 

    What you can also do is restrict the private content to only signed-in users, and remove the sign-in button from your Help Center so users are required to sign in through your product before accessing your internal Help Center articles. 

    A couple of ways to go about this but curious to know if any of these work for you.

    Let me know!

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