| Suite | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus |
| Support with | Guide Professional or Enterprise |
- Restricting your entire help center to signed-in users
only
You can prevent anonymous visitors from accessing your help center by requiring end users to sign in. This is known as a restricted help center. Visitors will only see the sign-in page.
- Setting view permissions that restrict signed-in users to a user
segment (this feature is not available on Suite Team)
You can define which of your help center users can have view access by setting the help center view permissions. The following options are available:
- Signed-in users This includes internal and external users who create an account and sign in to your help center.
- Agents and managers This option is for staff members only, so that you can create content that is internal-only.
- Custom user segment This option enables you to restrict viewing access to specific users based on tags, organizations, or groups by applying custom user segments (see Creating user segments to restrict access).
You can also restrict access to specific areas of your knowledge base (see Restricting access to knowledge base content) and community (see Restricting access to community content).
To restrict your help center visibility
- In Guide admin, click the Settings (
) icon in the
sidebar. - Under Security, select Require sign in.Note: If you are on an Employee Service plan, this option is not selectable. Your help center is restricted to signed-in users only.
- (Optional) If you want to restrict your help center visibility
to a segment, under Require sign in, select Limit to user
segment, then open the dropdown menu and select a
User segment. Note: Restricting visibility to a user segment is not available on Suite Team.
By default, the visibility of your help center is set to Signed in users.
- Click Update.
36 comments
Melinda F.
Hi,
We were hoping to use our Help Center as an internal resource for both agents and AI agents, but it seems Help Centers have to be activated in order to be used by AI Agents. So two questions:
1. Is it possible to “activate” the Help Center only for agents and admins?
2. If not, is it then best to enable the Help Center for signed-in users only? Would this include only agents and admins?
Thank you!
0
Ivan Miquiabas
Good day! Thanks for reaching out!
I believe you are referring to Contextual help, Contextual Help is a Web Widget (Classic) feature that uses the web page your visitor is currently on, along with your help center content, to suggest help center articles that may be relevant to their questions. Its goal is to reduce the effort required by an end user who may be trying to self-serve by suggesting contextually relevant articles.
Let us know if that helps!
0
Luke Aleo
We are using the Web Widget for a customer contact form and we have it linked to our Help Center. I do not want anonymous users submitted tickets through our Help Center, so we require a sign-in for that. If I have the Help Center secure then I am not seeing the option to search for articles from the Web Widget. Is there a way to enable that setting, or am I doing something wrong?
0
Lior
Hi,
I would like to know how can I restrict a specific end user to enter the help center and the gather section. Thanks.
0
Leslie Johnson
Good day. We are using the option "Require sign in." And each article is set to allow "Everyone" to view it. We are using keycloak code from our software application to authenticate users to be able to view the help center pages.
We have found that once a user is able to get into the Help Center and view articles, they have access to the Help Center for the next many hours... basically for the rest of the day. When they come in the next day, they have to access the help center via the software application again.
Is there a way that we can limit the number of minutes or hours that the user has access to the articles? For example, could we set a 4-hour limit? Or could we set it such that if the user logs out of the software application, they are also logged out of the help center?
Thank you.
0
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Chad Susa
Try putting below code at the bottom of your style.css file
.user-info, .nav-wrapper a.login {display:none;}And this at the bottom of your script.js file
$(document).ready(function(){var userRole = HelpCenter.user.role;
if (userRole == 'manager' || userRole == 'agent') {
$('.user-info').show();
}
});
Please note that Zendesk does not support nor guarantee custom code. If you add any customizations to your account and need assistance, you may need to reach out to your IT/Dev or try searching for a solution online.
Hope this helps!
0
Chad Susa (Gravity CX - Zendesk Partner)
Hi All
Is there a way to show the Guide Home Page to anonymous users but somehow restrict only certain users (eg: belonging to a particular Org) to sign in.
In effect we want to show the Home Page to anyone but ONLY allow certain users to sign in to the Help Center.
Many thanks.
0
Glasgow Credit Union
Hi there,
I am attempting to setup the Guide for use by our end-user costumers. I don't have the require sign-in option ticked however when I attempt to access the Help Centre as a customer I am redirected to a sign-up screen. How can I bypass this to allow any user to view articles?
Thanks
0
Dane
1. End-users will not see the sign in option. They will be routed directly on the sign in page/SSO once your are on the Help Center URL.
2. This is possible. However, if you have the option to "Require sign in" these articles will not appear as long as you are not signed in.
3. This will only work for signed in users.
Hope this helps!
Hi Peter and Jan,
Regarding this behavior, you will need to utilize Zendesk SSO option so that end-users on your app will also be logged in to the Help Center. Please take note that you will have to coordinate with your devs in order to implement this.
2
Thomas Foley
We have the same issue, but now I have a better understanding on the ramifications after talking with one of our lead developers and compliance officer (I'm paraphrasing here a bit).
To be ISO compliant, you can't pass login credentials from one server to another server that is not inside the same domain (again, paraphrasing).
Zendesk runs on their servers, our applications run on ours (and our Mobile App). We can't pass along user credentials from ours to theirs to access our help system and remaining ISO compliant. Kinda makes sense.
So, here was our solution:
This approach does mean you really have to watch the "Visible To" field on all your articles, but you can bulk check that pretty easy, too (I do this at the end of each day).
One interesting side effect of all this, is that we did discover we had content we want to publish that didn't really need any kind of security -- marketing/sales type stuff that was once hosted elsewhere. It is kinda nice to have everything in one place.
Oh, and we did add another guide (you can have up to 5 on most Zendesk suites, I think) that still requires login. This is, in fact, for internal use only. We modified the templates for that guide so the contents is only visible to Staff. All others who attempt to access it get pushed to the public guide.
2
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