Integrated social sharing with Digital Publishing Suite

Sharing is caring, and with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, publishers can setup social integration with Facebook, Twitter and Email directly within their application. Once sharing is enabled, users can click on article links on their desktop computers to launch the a DPS Web Viewer. Publishers can control which articles they want to allow users to share and can protect articles that they wish not to share. Publishers can also choose to setup a paywall that will appear to users once they have viewed a pre-determined number of articles in the Web Viewer. The paywall gives publishers a way to utilize social sharing to gain new subscribers. And now, it is possible to leverage your Digital Publishing Suite direct entitlement implementation with Adobe’s Web Viewer.

The introduction of the DPS Web Viewer, as part of the social sharing integration, is a great addition to the Digital Publishing Suite set of tools. The Web Viewer gives users that do not have a copy of the publication on their tablets a way to experience digital enhanced edition, including interactivity in a Web browser. The DPS Web Viewer is 100% HTML based and does not require the user to install any plugins.

The following tutorial will explain the steps for implementing social integration using the DPS App Builder and the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Administration portal.

Before configuring your applications to include social sharing features, it is helpful to first understand the basic workflow. The diagram below illustrates the process steps for a user sharing an article from their tablet to another user that is browsing Facebook on their desktop.

Social Sharing features are only available as configuration options in R20 or later Multi-Folio iPad or iPhone applications. Social Sharing is not available at this time for Android-based applications.

Prior to enabling Facebook sharing in App Builder, you will first need to setup a Facebook application. See this help article for tips on setting up your Facebook application

Once you have created your Facebook application, copy the Facebook Application ID as you will need to enter this into App Builder.

In App Builder navigate to the Social Sharing settings. Check the Enable Facebook Sharing button and paste in the Facebook Application ID.

The publication URL specified in this field should be a link to your publication’s website or a link to your publication’s iPad application. This URL will utilized when a user shares out a protected article from their iPad.

Enabling additional social sharing options for Email, Twitter and Copy link is as simple as hitting a check-box. Enabling “Copy Link” sharing allows the user to copy the article link to their clipboard. This link can be pasted to other social sharing services such as LinkedIn or Google+.

By default all articles uploaded to the Adobe Folio Producer site will be assigned the “Protected” status. Any articles that a publisher whishes to share must be un-checked in the article metadata

Once you have completed the build of the social-enabled viewer application, you will need to configure the Web Viewer settings in the Digital Publishing Suite administration dashboard. Login to http://digitalpublishing.acrobat.com with an account that has administration privileges. When the dashboard loads, click the Administration link in the left sidebar.

Once you are presented a listing of users, click the application account for which you wish to configure sharing.

Click on the "Enable Web Viewer" button and, optionally, specify a URL that users will be redirected to if they click a link to an article previously shared but now no longer available.

If you wish to limit the maximum number of downloads that any folio can consume in the Web Viewer, click on "Enable Fulfillment Limit," specify a limit and a URL that users are redirected to after an issue is "sold out."

Click the “Enable Paywall” button in this settings page.

The Paywall Threshold value controls how many articles you want a user to be able to read before they are hit with the paywall message.

The Paywall Button URL configures the website you want a user to be directed to after clicking the “Learn More” button in the paywall. Most publishers will want to direct users to a subscription purchase page, while other publishers will opt to direct users to the iTunes App Store link for their iPad app.

The Paywall Text field allows publishers to write a custom message that will be displayed to the user immediately upon hitting the paywall.

It is now possible to leverage your Digital Publishing Suite direct entitlement implementation with Adobe’s Web Viewer. With Direct Entitlement, users can use their existing subscription credentials to access content on the web. More importantly, new customers who discover a DPS publication via Social Sharing can now purchase a digital only subscription via direct entitlement at a publishers website or elsewhere.

Usage

With Social Sharing via the Web Viewer, users can view unprotected content up to the specific user’s “Paywall Threshold” or to an overall publisher’s Fulfillment Limit. Without Direct Entitlement integration, article views through the Web Viewer will be blocked after reaching either of these two limits. With direct entitlement integration, the Web Viewer will allow unlimited access to content that has been explicitly entitled. For example, if a user has an active subscription to a publication via direct entitlement, they will be able to view the content on any supported device AND also within the web viewer.

Figure 8 shows the Paywall that is presented to users upon reaching either of the aforementioned limits. The user has the option to “Sign in” using their direct entitlement credentials.

Configuration

To activate direct entitlement in the Web Viewer, the publisher must associate their publication account with their entitlement service. To do this, the publisher must contact their Adobe DPS representative providing both their direct entitlement “IntegratorID” and the application’s AdobeID, and request that Web Viewer direct entitlement be enabled. Once complete, any social views of content from the application’s account (as identified by Adobe ID), will attempt to authenticate users via the publisher’s provided ‘IntegrationID’.

Account Settings

Although the basic settings remain un-changed, the settings contained within the Account Administration have different implications when direct entitlement is activated.

The Paywall threshold is the number of unprotected articles a user can view from this publication before they are exposed to the Paywall.

The Paywall Button URL is associated with the “Learn More” button that is displayed when the user is directed to the Paywall (see below).  Ideally, this link would take the user to a site where they could purchase a digital subscription enabling them access to the Web Viewer and device content.

The Paywall Text should explain to the user what to do. It is the publisher’s opportunity to message the user about this experience.

Publication Settings

The publisher can choose to ‘protect’ or ‘un-protect’ individual articles at publish time. These settings are only used for the unauthenticated user of the web viewer. When the user is authenticated, these settings are overridden by the user’s entitlements as provided by the Direct Entitlement provider.

For more information on Direct Entitlement, see "Direct Entitlement Kit."

With DPS Release 23 (September 2012), many original limitations of Social Sharing have been lifted. However, there are still a few things to be aware of:

• Article content can only be shared from iOS devices running iOS 5.0 or later.
• PDF-based folios are now automatically converted to PNGs for the Web Viewer, so earlier limitations with PDF folios no longer apply.
• Users clicking on a share link while on an iPad will not be shown the Web Viewer, which is not yet supported on tablets. Instead, iPad users will be shown a landing page with a message asking the user to download the application. If the user already has the publication application installed, the action button will navigate to the specific issue to purchase. If the issue is already downloaded, the user will be automatically directed to the article that was linked.
• Some Overlays are that are not currently supported in the DPS Web Viewer will appear with a “content not available message,” these Overlays include:
  • Panoramas
  • Audio
  • (also note that overlay support is limited in Internet Explorer versions 8 and earlier)
• Apple Subscriptions are not currently supported in the “Sign in” option for the Web Viewer. Only Direct Entitlement credentials are currently recognized.
• Currently the URL used in the sharing link is not configurable (it shows http://contentviewer.adobe.com). In the future, a publisher will have the capability to mask this domain with one of their own.
• Currently the “Learn More” label on the paywall button is not configurable. In the future, publishers will have the ability to specify the text for this button.
• Currently the email template used for email sharing cannot be modified. In the future, publishers will have some flexibility in customizing this.

Additional Help article on setting up a Facebook App for social sharing in the Digital Publishing Suite Help: Setting up a DPS App for Social Networking. The Adobe TV DigPublishing series has a video on social sharing "DigPublishing: New Sharing Features, August 2012."

Secrets & Happiness of Digital Publishing blog post on setting up social sharing links within an individual article to point to a Website version of the same article: Share Articles via Facebook, twitter or eMail.

1/21/13

• Removed reference to the ability to use HTML in the Paywall text. This was never officially supported, and is being disabled.