Your site Domains are the URLS for both your Staging and Live sites. You must set your site Domains before publishing your site for the first time.
Most portals start out with the standard domains:
- Staging: yourorganization.staging.knowledgeconnection.conduent.com
- Live: yourorganization.knowledgeconnection.conduent.com
(or older portals: yourorganization.learnercommunity.com)
On your site, instead of "yourorganization", the site would be your organizational initials or name.
The Staging domain is the site where you are able to develop content safe from the public view.
The Live domain is the site where your learners will access the site and their enrollments, and where you will report on learner data.
You create both your Staging and Live domains in the Staging Admin Dashboard. On Live, you can configure your Live domain SSL Options.
Site>Domain is available on Staging and Live—but you see it only if you have the Manage Domains admin permission.
If your portal uses Native login (KC's login page that prompts for login id and password) then you must use the native knowledgeconnection.conduent.com (or legacy learnercommunity.com) domain.
However, if your portal uses external login via your own authentication system, then your portal can support a custom domain name (provided that you own it, or have legal access to use it). We recommend that you confer with your IT department if you opt not to use the default domain.
Your IT department would need to create a CNAME record in their DNS server so that the custom domain will resolve to your Live KC site. If your Staging site is XYZ.staging.knowledgeconnection.conduent.com then your DNS CNAME record would point to XYZ.knowledgeconnection.conduent.com
So that you can enable "always on SSL" (which is highly recommended) your IT department would also need to acquire a "wildcard" SSL certificate that covers your custom domain. For example, if your custom KC domain was elearning.yourdomain.com then your IT department needs to acquire an SSL certificate for *.yourdomain.com. View more details in the "SSL Option" section below.
- Click on the + button to add a new Staging or Live domain.
- Enter the Domain Name (URL)
- Select the Staging or Live environment
- Select the Default Language for the domain (the languages available are set on the Configuration page)
- Click the Add and Continue button.
- Click the Edit button to select the Default Home Page. This is the landing page for the URL. You may choose to set your site's "home" page as the default, but you can choose any page that you want to direct your learners to first.
- Click the Edit button to select the Enrollment Widget Page. This is the page that your learners will land on any time that they purchase or enroll in a product. You may have multiple pages that use an Enrollment Widget, but you must select one that is the default for accessing enrollments.
Enabling "always on SSL" is highly recommended, so that content will always be exchanged over an encrypted connection. This will help keep your learners' personal data secure.
Enabling SSL for your domains is very easy if you're using a "default" domain supplied by Knowledge Connection, It's also easy to enable if you have a custom domain, but you'll likely need to involve your IT department so they can acquire the appropriate SSL certificate, and provide it to you in the correct format.
On Staging you'll see 2 tables: one with Staging domains and one with Live domains.
- Admins are not restricted from editing a Staging domain, and they can manage SSL for Staging domains.
- A Live domain is fully editable until the portal is published, and then some fields become view only.
On Live you'll see only the table of Live domains. Admins can manage SSL for Live domains. (The "edit" option is view-only.)
Enabling the SSL option on a "native" domain (any hostname ending with knowledgeconnection.conduent.com or learnercommunity.com) applies the change within 5 minutes. Enabling SSL on a "custom" domain (on Live) happens overnight. If a problem surfaced, disabling the option happens within 5 minutes.
The certificate must be a single file that:
- "covers" the domain—for example, if the portal operates at elearning.xyz.org then the certificate needs to be a wildcard that covers *.xyz.org
- includes both public key and private key (which is typically protected by a password)
If using Windows, when viewing properties on the exported certificate file, you should see this note under "Valid From":
Although it's beyond the scope of Knowledge Connection to provide specific technical support for this IT process, the basic steps are:
- Obtain a certificate from a trusted SSL certificate vendor.
- The certificate server request (CSR) can originate from any of your servers/computers, (The certificate is yours, and the CSR can originate from your servers.)
- Conduent will not generate or provide a CSR.
- If your main web site operates at xyz.org, and your KC portal operates at a subdomain (for example elearning.xyz.org), then your main web site might already have a wildcard certificate that covers *.xyz.org. If so, then that existing certificate can be used by your web site and by your KC portal.
- Import the certificate into your server or computer, selecting the option to allow it to be exported.
- Export the certificate to a single .pfx file, selecting the option to include its private key. Because it includes the private key, you should be required to enter a password to protect access to the private key.
- If you already have a certificate (.crt) file and a separate private key (.key) file, you should be able to combine them using openssl:
openssl pkcs12 -export -out combinedfilename.pfx -inkey keyfilename.key -in certfilename.crt
It'll prompt a couple times for the "export password" to protect the .pfx file.