Hi all
We have a dilemma and are hoping for some wisdom. Currently we publish our online help to docs.company.com, which is hosted on AWS and available to the world. We cover customer facing products (both hardware and software) - things like APIs and the customer's management software that they use to keep tabs on their products/billing/stats etc.
However, the customer only has access to a proportion of our APIs and that management software - internally, there are a lot more features available to us.
How do we go about presenting all the relevant information to our external and internal customers, such that only our colleagues can view the internal docs?
My tech author colleague wants to have two separate targets using the same TOC, one with the internalonly content hidden (which will then get hosted on docs.company.com), and the other to be hosted on a separate website (internal-docs.company.com). He thinks maintaining a separate TOC with just internal docs within it will be too much admin. He also rightly points out that you can't search across both the external and internal site, and therefore you need access to all the information within one target.
I'm dead set against duplication - I feel that if information is available on one, it shouldn't be duplicated even if it's within a private sphere. This is because we have colleagues who will need to send links to customers - if they're looking at the internal site, they will need to then go to the external site to copy the correct link for sending (extra clicks feels like bad practice to me).
Someone suggested that you could possibly have restrictions within AWS itself, which would look at authentication (such as logging into the VPN) and allow people to see certain content accordingly. The dilemma with this is how do you link to the internal docs, and will it frustrate customers who cannot access those links. Has anyone done something similar?
Has anyone got a better solution?
Thank you!
Jen
Presenting external-facing vs internal-facing information
Re: Presenting external-facing vs internal-facing informatio
I'd say your colleague is right - producing two outputs is how you'd handle this in Flare.
Flare is a single-sourcing tool, and it's pretty straightforward to produce two separate targets from one source.
There shouldn't be any duplication as such - you'll presumably have the same base content, and use conditions to control any content that is internal only or external only.
The problem with trying to have two versions of your content in one single target/output, is that Flare simply doesn't support that - it doesn't handle dynamically hiding/showing content in a single output.
So if you want it to work in a single output, then you're going to produce your own solution to hack/force the Flare output to work the way you want.
You can write your own custom javascript to dynamically hide/show content in a single page - I've done this myself, seen it discussed here numerous times, and it's been covered in Flare blogs and webinars. However, as Flare doesn't 'know' about your custom code, that approach doesn't work with its components like the search and TOC/navigation, so your internal-only topics will still appear in the search results and TOC.
Also bear in mind that anything like this that hides content on the client-side is no good for security, as your customers can easily see your internal only content in the page source.
If your colleagues need to provide links, then it's pretty easy to create a "copy link" button on your internal site - e.g. take the current page URL, switch the internal URL to an external URL, and then display it or put it on the clipboard.
Flare is a single-sourcing tool, and it's pretty straightforward to produce two separate targets from one source.
There shouldn't be any duplication as such - you'll presumably have the same base content, and use conditions to control any content that is internal only or external only.
The problem with trying to have two versions of your content in one single target/output, is that Flare simply doesn't support that - it doesn't handle dynamically hiding/showing content in a single output.
So if you want it to work in a single output, then you're going to produce your own solution to hack/force the Flare output to work the way you want.
You can write your own custom javascript to dynamically hide/show content in a single page - I've done this myself, seen it discussed here numerous times, and it's been covered in Flare blogs and webinars. However, as Flare doesn't 'know' about your custom code, that approach doesn't work with its components like the search and TOC/navigation, so your internal-only topics will still appear in the search results and TOC.
Also bear in mind that anything like this that hides content on the client-side is no good for security, as your customers can easily see your internal only content in the page source.
If your colleagues need to provide links, then it's pretty easy to create a "copy link" button on your internal site - e.g. take the current page URL, switch the internal URL to an external URL, and then display it or put it on the clipboard.
Re: Presenting external-facing vs internal-facing informatio
Thanks Dave, the copy URL suggestion is a good one.