Authoring by end users

[#1]

Hello All,

We had earlier developed a survey creation tool within AEM which is currently being used by a handful of authors to create surveys using a set of components and configuring them as per their requirement.

While this has satisfied all the use-cases so far, we have been approached with a new use-case wherein any employee within the organisation can login using their employee credentials and create a survey, much like Google or Microsoft forms.

The requirement has stated that providing survey creation capability to these employees directly via AEM author is not an option since the employees are not all technically strong.

The request has been to wrap these capabilities into a webpage which will allow the user to create surveys on the fly.

Is there a way to extend the authoring capability directly onto the webpage? Or is there a better approach to this use-case that anyone can suggest?

Thanks in advance,

Kavya

[#2]

Hi Kavya,

As per your usecase, it suggests that employees should be authoring the survey page in a publish environment.

There is no out-of-the-box functionality provided in AEM to extend authoring in a publish instance. You have to do customizations for this usecase.

Here's what I would suggest:

1. Create a survey page and give all the functionalities such that when the employee logins to the survey page in website he has all options to create a survey - you can plan to develop the components in such a way that the fields required for the survey has to be available by a click of a button, I am just giving an example, you can tweak the code as per requirement.

2. Create a Closed User group, add the employees to the group and apply the CUG configurations to the survey page in author and activate. So whenever he hits the survey page in website, he is asked to login.

3. Make the CUG configurations in dispatcher as well.

4. If you are having more than one publisher and want to keep the survey content only within publishers but not author, you also need to sync the content between the publishers.

Best,

Cal

[#3]

Hi Cal,

I apologize, I was occupied in other activities and hence couldn't respond quickly.

You are correct in your understanding that the use-case is to provide authoring in the publish environment.

Can you please expand upon the first point where you mention creating a survey page with all options available?

All components in the author environment are editable with option to configure the Survey question, the possible values, whether it should be marked as mandatory or not etc.

How do you suggest I should handle this authoring capability in the publisher environment?

Regards,

Kavya C

[#4]

Hi Kavya!

What I meant with my previous comment is that,  you should be able to provide a page, where there is option for the employee to create a survey.This requires full customization.

For example you may have an idea of what kind of surveys or fields your client will create (or you can get a requirement from them).

- Provide a button like create text field

- On click on it, it will ask popup to fill the text field name (like last name,first name etc) and click on ok

- Field gets created in the page (all this logic should be developed by you).

- Once all the fields are created by the employee, he can click on create survey button which will create the survey

Similarly you can do for other fields (like checkbox ,etc). Basically, the fields required in survey need to be developed by you, so employee can just select/click the fields to create a survey.

PS: This suggestion is as per my assumptions and workflow, hope it can be helpful

Best,

Cal

[#5]

Hi Cal,

Thanks for the clarity. I will certainly give this approach a go-through.

Thank you for the help

Regards,

Kavya Chilukuri