Manage access to your catalog and course detail pages by choosing the Domain Access Level in Domains with Domains & Publishing. In this article, we'll explain what your access options are, and how to manage them.
What are my options?
- Public: Your catalog is visible to everyone.
- Login required: Your catalog is only visible after users sign up.
- Access code required: Your catalog is only visible after users sign up and input an access code provided by you or purchased by a user through a subscription (more information here).
You can also use Single Sign On (SSO) for your domain. You can learn more about SSO at Using Single Sign-On (SSO).
Which should I choose?
Public
You should choose Public if you want to allow anyone to see your course catalog and if you want it to be discovered within search engines, such as Google. This is great if you're selling training, or you'd like trainees to be able to browse prior to signing up. Here's an example.
- Example: "As an entrepreneur, I want all potential customers to see the range of my course offerings as easily as possible."
Students will still need to create an account before they're able to register. If you have SSO enabled, students will need to be authenticated through your SSO system before they can consume any of the training.
Login required
You should choose Login required if you want to limit (but not restrict) the visibility of your course catalog to users who have signed up. Requiring signup before viewing the catalog will capture more customer data and allow you to input sign-up fields to direct customers down learning paths based on their attributes (such as job title or software version used).
- Example: "Our business offers specialized training for project managers. We want to have users sign up and confirm they are PMs before seeing our course offerings."
If you have SSO enabled, students will need to be authenticated through your SSO system before they can access any of the training. Enabling login required with SSO is the most private option and is often used for customer-only and internal product training.
If your SSO is setup to allow users to create an account, it is definitely possible to use this method as an open training site where users have to sign up for an account in order to access free content.
Access code required
You should only choose Access code required* if you want users who sign up and input your access code to see your course catalog. Students can be sent an access code, a hyperlink with an access code appended, or can be invited directly to the training site from the Skilljar Dashboard, which will bypass the need to enter the access code. If you invite someone directly, they’ll receive an email invitation to the domain with a direct link directing them to a signup page where their email is pre-entered, and entering a code isn't necessary.
This is best for materials where access needs to be kept private to certain individuals, such as employee training. Another way to do this would be to leverage SSO for the domain.
- Example: "We create confidential training for our business partners and require users to be pre-approved before seeing our catalog."
*Note that access codes are only applicable at the domain level, and cannot be used to limit access to individual courses. (For more information on limiting course visibility, refer to Making Courses Visible to Select Groups)
How can I choose or edit my choice?
- Go to your Skilljar Dashboard, expand the Domains & Publishing header, and select Domains to open the Domains page.
- Find the domain you want to edit and select Domain Settings.
- Scroll down to Access and choose your Domain access level
- Manage any settings, such as an optional Access message.
- When you're finished, select Save Access Settings.
- Optional: If you choose Login required or Access code required, you can edit the message shown to users on the login, signup and (if applicable) access code input pages.
- If you choose Access code required, after you select "Save Access Settings," you will be able to create new access codes.
Some things to consider:
- Users will still need to sign up and register to access your courses, no matter which level you choose. (Unless you disable the registration requirement).
- Users can filter which courses appear in your catalog using tags, learn more.
- You can choose which courses a user sees in your course catalog by using groups, learn more.
- Learn more about access codes.
- Learn more about course catalogs
Questions to Answer before determining ideal Domain Access settings
- Who is your main training audience? Do you have a secondary audience?
- Do all of your training audiences have a login to your application?
- Do you have SSO for your learning users?
- Do different audiences have different login methods (internal v. external v. partner)
- What type of SSO do you use?
- If no SSO - do you want to restrict your training site?
Multiple Domains
Multiple Domains for Related Audiences
Multiple domains are effective when you are offering the same or similar training to different audiences that are related to each other. This means that a customer will start taking training on one domain and then will change state (for example, become a customer and get an SSO account) and then will continue taking training on another domain.
This is usually set up for a Marketing, Lead Gen, Pre-customer access, and is linked inherently to a customer-only domain.
- Note: this section will ignore the standard internal training / external training domain use case even though that is very standard for Skilljar customers. In this use case, Domains are usually treated as completely separate entities and you would not normally have the same Student interact with both domains as a part of your regular process.
Public SSO domain and Login Required domain
- With this model, anyone can see the training that is visible to everyone on your SSO Domain - users who do not have SSO are able to select “Sign up as Guest” which brings them to the Login Required domain where some or all of the courses are also published.
- Using cross-domain access, you can allow students to maintain training progress for their courses when they become customers and are given an SSO login.
Subscription (SSO) and Public domain
- Subscription and Public domain - Free domain doesn’t allow students to register for any courses or even sign in - they direct all students who want to take training to sign up for their subscription domain.
- Free domain is used as a pre-sales marketing tool so that users can see what they will have access to once they purchase the application and get an SSO login.
Multiple Domains for Unrelated Audiences
As you can have limitless Skilljar Domains, if you are looking to offer training to unrelated audiences you can set up each of your domains with different SSO methods and treat them separately as Single domains
A great use case for this is internal vs. external training. Many companies use a different Authentication system for their internal users from their customers. In this case, your internal domain could have SSO for the internal domain and access the same training as your external customers who use the same SSO as your application. These are fully separate domains and you would not have any users switch from one domain to another in this use case.