Page authoring : Sharing page to non-users

[Mr_Christophe]

Hi,

For an upcoming project our client wants to be able to share pages to non authoring-aem users for informal review.

The ideal goal is to allow an author to share the current page as a link in a email to allow preview from the mail recipient.

As this feature does not seem to be build-in AEM, we've figured out a few workarounds :

• Edit the page and copy it to an area on the authoring env. that does not require authentication (this might need some configuration to allow a specific subpath on readonly for unauthenticated users)
• Activate the page on a hidden path on the publisher environment and remove indexing on this page
• Export the page as pdf and share it by mail (this seems feasible although not yet tested)

Any other leads/tracks/infos are welcome.

Kind regards,

Christophe

[smacdonald2008]

Are you using Workflows for this - seems like a workflow would be a great way to proceed. 

[Mr_Christophe]

Hi,

thanks for quick answer.

Actually we have planned a workflow for formal article/page validation.

But this in this scenario let the CEO of the company wants to review the page.

And this CEO does not have an authoring account because he has a million things to do and can't remember passwords (or does not have authoring account)

(this is the actual example that I was given)

[smacdonald2008 · Accepted solution]

One thing you may want to do is have the workflow publish to staging server (we do this using AEM) and then send an email to the CEO (and others) to review (you can use a custom WF step) then include a link in the staged content in the email.

We have built a similar setup within Adobe,  

[jessielouthan]

Is this an indexed page? I'm assuming that they wouldn't need to login.

(I'm asking because we had this same issue at my last job, and I anticipate it being an issue at my new gig)

Also, we're going to have worfkflows for the "Content Approvers" to approve the authors' work (for legal/compliance reasons).

[jessielouthan]

Is this an indexed page? I'm assuming that they wouldn't need to login.

(I'm asking because we had this same issue at my last job, and I anticipate it being an issue at my new gig)

Also, we're going to have worfkflows for the "Content Approvers" to approve the authors' work (for legal/compliance reasons).

[Jörg_Hoh]

Hi,

this is a very common requirement and a Scott already outlined a simple solution to it (preview environment), which is adding complexity to it.

But whatever your solution looks like please consider:

• How do you get the approval information (or the non-approval) back to the authoring instance, where you can react on it? If you publish this page to a preview or content staging environment, you need to implement this by yourself.
• If you offer the page available to all (on the intranet), everyone can actually approve or reject the change, and not only the CEO. The content is actually available to all people who know the exact link (and very often it's nor hard to guess such links). Then please don't handle sensitive data this way (like quartely results).
• You should check if the AEM license contract allows you to do that. If your license has a restricted amount of named users, allowing "anonymous approval" is a way to bypass that contractual restriction. Please double-check before you implement it.

kind regards,
Jörg