Building-Secure-Zones

Eclipse Online Solutions website hosting and developement

Building a Secure Zone for your website

Introduction

Using Secure zones is a fantastic way to manage your customer service, or provide your loyal customers with your best value added content. With every secure zone registration you are capturing yet more customer's valuable details. Our system enables you to do this in just a few simple steps and without requiring any programming knowledge. Making any parts of your website as well as other content types such as Announcements, Literature and FAQs secure is an extremely simple process.

Secure Zones allow you to designate one or more areas of your public web site as secure. Accessing the Secure Zone requires customers to enter their username and password. If this is not entered they will be denied access to the Secure Zone. You can set up as many Secure Zones as you need to. Secure Zones can be established to provide customized content for different types of users.Once an item has been made secure only your customers that have been given permission can access it with their login username and password.

Creating Secure Zones

This guide has two distinct parts

Firstly, you need to choose a secure web page to display customer enquiries (cases) on (steps 1 - 6)
Secondly, you need to give customers login details and access to the secure web page so they can view the history of their enquiries (steps 7-10).

Select from the menu Website -> Secure Zones and click on Create a new Secure zone from the Action box
Enter a name for your new Secure Zone and select the Save button.
You probably want to have a landing page inside your secure zone that contains your secure content. Use the 'Landing Page drop down menu to select a landing page. This page does not need to be in a secure zone, but usually is.

Setting up a new Secure Zone

To create a new Secure Zone:

Select Create a new Secure Zone.
Enter a Name for the Secure Zone.
Select a web page to use as the landing page. The landing page is the page that the customer will be directed to after logging in.

Making Content Secure

In a secure zone, click Make content secure link in the Action Box and add any item e.g. web page, announcement, literature, FAQ and industry content to this secure zone. Once an item has been added to a Secure zone it can no longer be accessed unless the customer accessing it has successfully logged in. You may want to test this by adding a web page to this Secure zone and then trying to access it via your web browser.

Adding login box

You need to place a login box so users can enter their username and passwords and access secure content. To do this, select a web page, and use the Module manager to insert a Secure zone login box on your web page. Make sure you Publish your webpage.

Managing Secure Zone Subscribers

Customers can be added to a secure zone by subscribing them to it. Choose a customer and retrieve their Customer Record. Select the Manage customer subscriptions link from Action Box. Here you can grant them access to any of your Secure Zones, and email them their username and password. Before doing this however, you must set up their username and password in the customer details section.

Alternatively, customers can be added to a Secure Zone by filling in a web form. To create a form that does this, go to Modules -> Web Forms -> select the form -> Add system fields to Web Form and then you can select a Secure Zone that the customer should be given access to upon submission of the form. You may optionally want to allow them to provide a Username and Password. After submission of this web form, they will be redirected to the secure zones landing page.

Setting the expiry date for a secure zone subscription upon the web form submission

You can set the expiry date of a secure zone upon web form submission. To set it up you need to go to a page the web form is residing on and go to the HTML view. There you need to create a field called: ZoneExpiry and enter the date in dd-MMM-yyyy format.

e.g.

<input type="hidden" value="1-Oct-2008" name="ZoneExpiry" />

In this example the customer's secure zone access will expire on 01-October-2008.

If you wish the expiry to calculate a 'number of days from the current date', you will need to use Javascript to achieve this calculation and insert the date value into the above field accordingly.

You can use the following code to set the date to some future date -

function setExpiryDate( )
{
    var dat=new Date();
    dat.setDate(dat.getDate() + 45);
    var monthname=new Array("Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun", "Jul","Aug","Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec")
    var pretty = dat.getDate() + "-" + monthname[dat.getMonth()] + "-" + dat.getFullYear();    
    document.getElementById("ExpiryDate").value = pretty;
}

The "+45" part can be set to however many days out you want the expiry to be.

Creating secure zone login

If you need to grant permission to your customers to access a secure zone you need to assign a username and password to their record. Go to Customers -> Create a New Contact to create a new customer record or retreive existing customer record. Then click edit and provide a username and password for this contact.

Emailing secure zone details to a customer

There are two ways in which you can email secure zone details to a customer.

First method will email the login details to a single contact. Firstly, you need to go to Customers menu item and find the customer's contact. You then need to go to Manage customer subscriptions in the Action Box and find the Secure Zone Subscriptions section. You simply then need to click on Email Login Details.

Secure Zone - Email login details - single.jpg

Second method will email the login details to anyone who is subscribed to a particular secure zone. All you need to do is go to Website -> Secure Zones -> click on the secure zone you want to email the login details for and click on Email login details to subscribers.

Secure Zone - Email login details - multiple.jpg

Managing secure zone subscriptions

To manage subscriptions to the secure zones, in the Admin interface, go to Website -> Secure Zones and click on the zone you need. Click the Subscribers link and you can remove subscribers from there.

Secure Zones & Content

You can add any content from your website to the Secure Zone. When content is placed in a Secure Zone it cannot be viewed by a customer browsing your website.

Content secure zone.jpg

You can add items to the secure zone by moving them from left to right. You can also add an item to a secure zone when editing the item itself, via the Secure Zone menu item.

Note: A common mistake when making items such as Announcement and FAQs secure is to make the web page that this item appears on secure only. This does not make the item secure. To ensure total security the Announcement or the FAQ item must be made secure.

Logging in to Secure Zones

To allow a customer to log in to a Secure Zone, you must add a Secure Zone login box to a webpage or template. To do so when creating the Secure Zone, click on the Add login box to a web page link in the Action Box and select the web page you want to insert the login box on. Click the 1-Click Insert dropdown menu to insert the log in box as in the picture below.

Alternatively you can use the Module Manager when editing a web page or template. You can find the Secure Zone login box under the Secure Zones heading in the module manager.

Logging in through a URL from external site

You can login into the secure zone from an external site by constructing the URL such as this one:

http://yourdomain.com/ZoneProcess.aspx?ZoneID=1&Username=Richard&Password=Dawkins

In this example the domain is http://yourdomain.com/, the username is Richard and password is Dawkins. You simply need to replace these with your details.

Get HTML Code (for sites hosted on a different system)

If you want to place this Secure Zone on a website hosted elsewhere then you may copy and paste the HTML code provided in under the HTML Code link. This approach is useful if you want to host your secure content with Your Online Business and the remainder of the website on a 3^rd party hosting environment.

If you are using Your Online Business to host the entire website then use Add to web page link in the Action Box or Triangle to easily add a Secure Zone login box to any web page.

Publishing Case History for Customers in Secure Zones

As secure zones are accessed by the customers you specify from within your customer database, you are able to publish much of the information relating to a customer in those secure zones. This allows customers to access information relating to them easily and securely. For example you can publish all cases for a given customer in a secure zone so that customer can view these, download any related files, and view the message threads.

To learn more review the earlier topic on Customer service zone.

Who's Logged in Module

The who's logged-in module displays the name of the current customer that is logged in to a secure zone on your website. When a customer is logged in this module displays:

John Citizen Logged in. Log Out.

Otherwise it appears as:

No one logged in Log in.

To use the module add it to any web page

No one logged in.

To include a link to your login web page that allows customers to login, insert:

No one logged in. Log in