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perfecci0nista
perfecci0nista
Level 2
March 28, 2017
Solved

previewing the site by external user

  • March 28, 2017
  • 8 replies
  • 5587 views

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. 

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    Best answer by joerghoh

    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

    8 replies

    MC_Stuff
    MC_Stuff
    Level 10
    March 29, 2017

    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,

      D
      dragon2A
      Level 5
      March 29, 2017

      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
      perfecci0nistaAuthor
      Level 2
      March 30, 2017

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

      D
      dragon2A
      Level 5
      March 30, 2017

      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.

        joerghoh
        Adobe Employee
        joerghohAdobe EmployeeAccepted solution
        Adobe Employee
        March 30, 2017

        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
        smacdonald2008
        Level 10
        March 30, 2017

        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. 

        S
        Siux-1
        August 9, 2017

        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​

        joerghoh
        Adobe Employee
        joerghohAdobe Employee
        Adobe Employee
        August 9, 2017

        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

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