previewing the site by external user

[perfecci0nista]

We have our production environment with one author instance and two load balanced publish instances. Every content change in the page needs to be reviewed by our legal team. The legal team is vast and we cannot add them all as user to AEM. We need a way to share the URL which will be accessible by legal team without logging in and without author publishing it to publish instance (which means it is live).

Any help/ideas are much appreciated. 

[MC_Stuff]

Hi,

For assets link sharing is oob [1] & you might need to implement same logic for pages.  We internal solve this requirement by having an seperate dispatcher with hardcoding preview user details along with wcm mode.

[1]  https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-2/administer/content/assets/link-sharing.html

Thanks,

[dragon2A]

Hi ,

 we have a similar kind of requirement in our case it's easy because of our UI login in PHP already so we used the same technique for the preview as well.  

We get the page JSON from the AEM server and we render that it on UI side without login to AEM. 

Thanks

[perfecci0nista]

Could you please provide me little more details if possible. Thanks.

[dragon2A]

what kind of information are you looking for? We have written one service to get the JSON data from the AEM and after that PHP will render that JSON in UI.

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I don't that there is any other feasible solution to this problem than giving the reviewers accounts on the AEM author. Not requiring authentication (even only for read) is very likely not an option.

The things you should consider for this topic are:

• How do you manage the process? Do you want to use AEM workflows? To function properly user-accounts on the AEM instance are required.
• There should be an audit trail in the system and not in the email inbox of people

Jörg

[smacdonald2008]

Agree with Joerg. AEM Author content is located on the server and needs to be accessed to view the content. Even if you use Workflows (which may help) - user accounts on Author is still required. 

[Siux]

Hi Jörg,

I'm interested in knowing your thoughts about the solution presented by Mc Stuff above: "We internal solve this requirement by having an separate dispatcher with hardcoding preview user details along with wcm mode."

Would you consider this a good practice?

I'm trying to address similar issue, where our client's only requirement is to preview pages before going live (no other workflow involved). Would you say setting a Dispatcher (only accessible from an Intranet) over author and rewriting the url to wcmmode=disabled is a good approach? If so, is there an example of how to best set this up?

Thanks in advance

Alejandro

cc smacdonald2008​

[Jörg_Hoh]

Hi,

You can implement your preview this way for sure. But

* you have to implement a different workflow for approving/rejecting pages. Typically via phone or email.... We are in 2017 and AEM has an integrated workflow capability for exactly this usecase.

* everyone which knows this URL is capable to preview the page before it is going live. Depending on your content and your business this can be very problematic.

* finally it can be a legal issue; because if your AEM license contract limits the number of named user on authoring, you bypass this limit using this approach.

So technically it's not a problem. But still I do not recommend it.

kind regards,
Jörg