21 September - Guest access

We are proud to introduce a better way to improve self-sustainability among customers or inform visitors about the opportunities they have to use digital services. Start using public access to serve your SelfGuide content to guest users in the same way as you would for colleagues. This feature is already in use by a few customers as part of a preview phase and will be made globally available this release. Read more about public access and other changes below.  

Public Access

Organizations use SelfGuide for several purposes and use cases. With this release a new one is added in the form of the public access feature for serving guest users. Guest users are unknown users, mostly outside your organization, without an account that an employee would have. They use a different way to sign-in and are allowed to see just a subset of the available content available for the organization.

In this release, the feature flag is removed, making the public access feature globally available for all customers. A more extensive explanation about the feature can be found below:

Public Access comprises two additions:

• The content channel Everyone is added as a default channel and is disabled by default. An admin may enable the Everyone channel, resulting in editors gaining the ability to assign content to that channel. Only content assigned to the Everyone channel is visible for guest users.

• After enabling the Everyone channel, the login page contains a secondary option to continue as a guest user at the bottom of the login form. When choosing to continue as a guest, the user is signed in as a normal user but only has access to the content assigned to the Everyone channel. The guest user does not need to supply a username or password to gain access to SelfGuide.

A few notes important to be aware of:

• A guest can be sent to SelfGuide directly, bypassing the login form using the URL https://demo.selfguide.com/guest (replace demo with the name of your own tenant).
• A guest can be sent to specific content in SelfGuide by extending the URL with a page, for example https://demo.selfguide.com/guest?page=awi/41e4d166-6777-44ef-6957-08da9a1da8db. The example shows the direct URL to open an AWI, but the same technique can be used for a User Guide, a chapter in a User Guide, a Course or a module in a Course.
• Guest do have the ability to supply feedback, but for an editor it is unknown who really supplied the feedback as only the name Guest is shown as the author.
• When disabling the Everyone content channel, all content assigned to the Everyone channel is automatically assigned to the Organization content channel.

If you would like to see the Public Access feature in action ahead of using it in your own tenant, contact info@selfguide.com or replay the webinar of 20 September where the feature is presented.

Page navigation AWI Library

The AWI Library contains all available AWIs, which may range from a few to more than 1500. AWIs, meeting the search & filter criteria, are shown in fixed sets with the ability to page to the next and previous set. This navigation has been updated in two ways:

• The page size has been increased from 15 to 30 to optimize for larger screens without impacting user experience and performance
• The paging controls have been moved from the top to the bottom, as it's more intuitive to go to the next page when reaching the end of the page
• The information is now split, with the paging controls on the right and the information about the current page on the left

Switch button removed in AWI Viewer

The AWI Viewer contained a Switch button, used to inform the user about how to switch easily between SelfGuide and the application the AWI instructs about. In practice, this button was rarely used. By removing the button, the interface is kept clean and space is made available for other functionality.

New application icons

Icons are added for the applications below:

• GIMP
• Microsoft Bitlocker
• Yubico YubiKey
• NEXUS

Inform user about non-existing imported User Guide

Opening an imported User Guide using a URL resulted in a white page when the User Guide did not exist. A modal has been added to inform the user about the non-existence so the user is made aware and is able to continue their usage of SelfGuide.