Protecting Your User Manuals
Quite often, there's a need to grant access to a publication only to certain people. There are multiple possible options to protect your online documentation in ClickHelp.
Security Through Obscurity (Secret Link)
Create a public publication for the restricted content but do not expose a link to the publication anywhere. Show the link only in login-protected pages of your web application. This way, people will not see your documentation unless they either log in to your system or someone provides them with a direct link.
Implementation difficulty: Easy
Security level: Low
ClickHelp Restricted Access - Single Account
ClickHelp supports creating password-protected user manuals. When someone navigates to a Restricted Publication topic, they are automatically redirected to the login page. Once they log in, the system redirects them to the topic they tried to access.
When using this approach, you would need to create a separate Power Reader account for every reader. If this is not possible, you can provide everyone with the same login and password to access the docs. Logging in under the same user is allowed for Power Reader, so multiple readers can log in using a single account simultaneously. To learn more, check the Restricted User Manuals help topic.
Implementation difficulty: Medium
Security level: Medium
Host and Protect
Publish to Web Help and host it on your own server behind your own login. Web Help basically repeats the ClickHelp portal reader interface in its core functionality and is not dependent on the portal in any way - it's a totally separate package. It can be even shipped with your product and opened from a local file system, so you don't even need a server to host it as it's usual HTML with associated styles, scripts and images. To learn more, check the Create a Web Help Manual help topic.
Implementation difficulty: Medium
Security level: High
ClickHelp Restricted Access - Different Accounts
You can also create a separate Power Reader account for every user to give different access levels to different users. Of course, you don't have to do this manually. Apparently, you have a user controlling mechanism in your web application. You can use ClickHelp REST API to integrate user account creation in your ClickHelp portal with user account creation in your web application. To learn more, check the ClickHelp API section.
Implementation difficulty: Medium
Security level: High
ClickHelp Restricted Access - Single Sign-On
ClickHelp supports the OpenID Connect technology of Single Sign-On. This means that you can integrate your web application and documentation portal authentication. When using this approach, your clients will not have to remember two sets of credentials - logging in to your web application will also mean authentication in the documentation portal. To learn more, check the Single Sign-On help topic.
Implementation difficulty: Medium
Security level: High
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Important |
| You will need to implement an OpenID Connect Identity Provider on your side (if you don't have it) for the SSO option to work. | |