ContentCloud

ClickLearn ContentCloud enables authors to publish a fully functional training and documentation website, without having to source any servers or platforms. ContentCloud is based on the secure and high availability cloud service Microsoft Azure.

Each project published to ContentCloud will be accessible from a URL. This URL can be shared with end-users to allow them to consume content, or possibly integrated into the application/platform documented with ClickLearn.

What is a URL?

Wikipedia defines a URL as an abbreviation for “Uniform Resource Locator”, and it refers to a web address, a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. For example, the URL to access the Google search engine in your browser would be “http://www.google.com”. 

ContentCloud™️ URLs

URLs created with ContentCloud are not fully customizable, but based on a set of variables: 

“ https://�organization]. content.3region]. clicklearn.com/tprivate/publiccontent]/ cprojectname]/ [projectname].htm “

For example, a customer “ACME, Inc.” publishes project “ERP Learning to ContentCloud, generating the following URL:

“ https://acme.content.us.clicklearn.com/publiccontent/ERP%20Learning%20Portal/ERP%20Learning%20Portal.htm ”

This enables ContentCloud to create new online websites for customers on the fly, however, the nature of the ContentCloud URLs makes them hard to remember. Two options to get around this, is to use URL forwarding or a URL shortening service.

URL forwarding

URL forwarding (explained in great detail in this Wikipedia article) is a technique which makes a web resource available under more than one URL. Continuing the example above, if customer “ACME, Inc.” owns and operates the domain “acmeinc.corp”, they could setup URL forward on subdomain “erplearning.acmeinc.corp” to forward to https://acme.content.us.clicklearn.com/publiccontent/ERP%20Learning%20Portal/ERP%20Learning%20Portal.htm. The effect of this would be that anyone entering “erplearning.acmeinc.corp” in their browser, would be redirected automatically to https://acme.content.us.clicklearn.com/publiccontent/ERP%20Learning%20Portal/ERP%20Learning%20Portal.htm, and thus be able to consume the published ClickLearn content, without the need to remember the tricky ContentCloud URL. 

To use the URL forwarding technique, a customer is required to make the necessary DNS changes through their domain name service provider.

URL shortening and link services

If a customer does not own a domain, or for some reason is unable to perform the necessary changes through their domain name service provider, a URL shortening service such as bitly or tinyurl can be used to create a short, easy-to-remember URL, to replace the ContentCloud URL.