Integrated social sharing with Digital Publishing Suite

Prerequisite knowledge

To follow along with this tutorial you will need:

• Knowledge of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
• Basic understanding of Facebook applications

Required Adobe products

• Digital Publishing Suite, Professional or Enterprise Edition
• Access to DPS Application Account configuration
• Access to DPS Viewer Builder

Sharing is caring, and with the latest release of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (Release 20 – May 2nd, 2012), 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 View. 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.

The introduction of the DPS Web View, as part of the social sharing integration, is a great addition to the Digital Publishing Suite set of tools. The Web View 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 View 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 Adobe Viewer 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 introduced in Release 20 are only available as configuration options in V20 Multi-Folio iPad applications. Social Sharing configuration is not available at this time iPhone or Android-based applications.

Prior to enabling Facebook sharing in Viewer 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 Viewer Builder.

In Viewer 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 paywall 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 set the paywall.

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 should be noted that it is possible to include basic HTML code in this field for display.

While the release 20 implementation of Social Sharing is a big step-up from the previous release 19 implementation, there are some current limitations to be aware of. A number of these limitations will be lifted with the next release of Social Sharing.

• Article content can only be shared from iPad 1 and 2 devices running iOS 5.0 or later.
• Sharing article content from an iPad 3 will allow other iPad users to see a landing page prompting them to download or launch the iPad application. Currently, article content shared from an iPad 3 folio will not be available for viewing in the DPS Web View.
• Sharing of PDF-based folios may produce unexpected results, as the Web Viewer will try to download the article PDF if the user has configured PDFs to automatically download. At this time it is recommended that 1024 based folios be formatted as PNG to achieve the best results with social sharing. 2048 based folios can continue to be PDF format. See this DPS Dev Net article on iPad 3 publishing best practices .
• Users clicking on a share link while on an iPad will not be shown the Web Viewer, but 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 allow the to navigate to the specific issue to purchase. If the issue is already downloaded, the user will be directed to the article that was linked.
• Some Overlays are that are not currently supported in the DPS Web View will appear with a “content not available message,” these Overlays include:
  • Nested Overlays
  • Panoramas
  • Scrolling Frames
  • Pan/Zoom Overlays set to “Pan Only”
• Currently the URL used in the sharing link is not configurable (it shows http://adobepublish.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.

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.