Are Madcap Flare URLs open to anyone with the URL?

[dturpin2021]

Does MadCap Flare provide any authentication model or is it open to anyone with the URL? Although our help is web based, we don't want customers to share the URLs to our help for our competition to have access to it? Or is this something that needs to be limited by the IT dept?

Thank you!

[ChoccieMuffin]

There is another question I want to ask, but in brief, I think it may be your IT department who need to provide a solution, as generally the output from Flare is just a bunch of html and supporting scripts, so there's no reason why anyone who has access to the location where it's stored couldn't see it.

Are you hosting your help on MadCap Central, or just putting your output somewhere on your own servers?

If using Central, as I understand it you are able to make the output "Private", which means that a viewer has to log in in order to be able to view your files.

If your output lives on your own servers, has your IT dept set up some kind of firewall so that users have to log in? If so, then your output is protected.

I'm sure there will be others chiming in with other comments, but I think I've summed up the basics, assuming a fairly standard HTML5 output - feel free to jump in and correct me if I've got it wrong though.

[RamonS]

This question comes up from time to time. If the help contains anything that will be of advantage to the competition then you may need to seek other ways of providing it. Even with authentication someone may download the whole help and pass it on. Obscurity is not effective security.