Sitecore 122Following up on the initial module release of the Sitecore Authenticated Preview module, I have now released version 1.1 for download. In this new version, authors can preview what a page would look like to a specific user by selecting an account on the Experience ribbon.

No more guessing as to whether your security settings or DMS personization will trigger correctly!

Making the most of the Preview mode

Even with Experience Explorer available, there is currently no way to preview the impacts of security or personalization rules that are built to target account data. The Authenticated Preview module provides this functionality for authors who have personalized content based on profile properties or secured a page based on user roles.  These authors can now use this module to select test users to preview changes and validate that the personalizations are behaving as expected.

This is particularly helpful in a scenario where you are integrating with Active Directory and wish to personalize using profile data stored in Active Directory. Using the existing Sitecore LDAP module, you can pull data into the user profile based on defined mappings and then leverage these in Sitecore DMS rules. After you have configured your page, you can create test users in Active Directory with various profile configurations that should trigger your different security/personalization scenarios.

PreviewAsUser_PageEditorRibbon
New selection area on the Experience ribbon

When your targeting is configured, use the Preview as User feature from the Experience ribbon in Page Editor to view the page as that user and have it execute the personalization rules!

What is next for the module?

Release 1.1 will be the final functionality release for Sitecore 6.x and 7.x. I will still be releasing maintenance releases to address bugs while those versions still have Mainstream Support.

The next quarterly release will see the introduction of support for Sitecore 8. I have been slow in getting to Sitecore 8, but felt that the Preview as User functionality was a higher priority. From there, all enhancements to the module will be done for Sitecore 8 and up.

4 Comments

  1. Hi Jason, did you ever finish the Sitecore 8 implementation of the module? I’d be interested in using it since I have a site that has both secure and anonymous sections. Thank you.

    1. Hi Jose, due to lack of interest in the Sitecore 8 version of the module I had discontinued my plans for updating this to the new platform. Perhaps I need to rethink that decision 🙂

      1. If you do it would be greatly appreciated. I don’t know what it would entail to do it, but I think this is a feature where Sitecore missed the mark.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s