s Institutional Access | Clickshare Service Corp.

Institution-Level Access

Clickshare-enabled websites can easily provide bulk access to their content to patrons at libraries, university students, customers at coffee shops or employees of companies.

Clickshare's clients often choose to sell this type of access to institutions as a bulk rate subscription. They can choose to enable a single method of providing institution-level access to support all of the institutions that they have a relationship with, or they can choose to use different institution-level access methods for each institution.

These methods can be used to grant access to all of your content to all customers who are associated with each institution or it can be used to grant access only to certain types of content to customers associated with each institution. This allows you to choose to only grant free access to specific categories of articles to customers accessing from each institution.

Each institution can be configured separately to either grant access to all of your content to customers who are associated with the institution or it can be used to grant access only to certain types of content to customers associated with the institution. For example, choosing to grant access only to certain types of content allows you to do things like grant access to only archived website articles but not breaking news articles or your eEdition.

Compare Institution-Level Access Methods

indicates that the functionality is supported for the method of providing institution-level access
indicates that the functionality is not supported for the method of providing institution-level access
indicates that the functionality is can be configured for the method of providing institution-level access
IP-based Authentication Bypass
Code-based Authentication Bypass
Email Domain-Limited Institutions
IP-Limited Institutions
Sub Account Subscription Access
Access to different types of content can be configured separately for each institution
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
Requires that customers associated with an institution create an account
no
no
yes
yes
yes
Access is IP-based
yes
no
no
yes
no
Access is email domain-based
no
no
yes
no
no
Access is URL or code-based
no
yes
no
no
no
Institution access can be used anywhere in the world
no
yes
yes
no
yes
Institution usage reports available
no
yes
yes
yes
yes
Access can be configured to automatically expire for an institution
no
yes
no
no
yes
Requires that customers confirm their email by clicking on a link sent to them when registering
no
no
yes
optional
no
Welcome emails to new registrants, customized to the institution
no
no
optional
optional
optional
Access for the institution is automatically limited to a certain number of users
no
no
no
no
yes

Institution-Level Access Details

IP-based Authentication Bypass

This type of institution-level access skips authentication completely for customers accessing content from within the IP range or ranges associated with a particular institution.

Because this method bypasses authentication, all requests that originate from IPs within the range(s) are associated with a single Clickshare account. This means that we are very limited in the reporting that we can provide about the accesses associated with the IP ranges for institutions that are configured in this manner. For customers or institutions that require more detailed reporting, we offer additional types of institution-level access.

This is included in Clickshare Core.

Code-based Authentication Access

For this type of institution-level access, each institution is assigned a unique URL. This unique URL can be configured to expire at a certain time or it can be configured to work indefinitely.

When a customer visits the unique URL for the institution, access to content is given to the browser for the rest of the browser session.

This type of institution-level access can be used to restrict access when an IP range extends beyond the intended access group. For example, if a university uses a single IP range campus-wide, the university librarians would visit the university's unique URL on the library computers to give those browsers access to content for the duration of the browser sessions. Using this method in this way grants access to students on the computers at the university library without granting access to the entire school.

This is available as an add-on module.

Email Domain-Limited Access

This type of institution-level access does not require customers to access from a specific IP range. Instead, the institution gets a customized URL for registration that requires the customer's email address to match one or more specified domains.

In order to confirm that customers who register using this URL are actually associated with the institution, accounts created using this page cannot be used to access content until the customer activates the account by clicking on a link in an email sent to the customer's email address. The login pages and welcome emails sent to customers accessing from this type of institution can be customized to each specific institution.

Accounts associated with this type of institution-level access can be used from anywhere, once they are activated.

This is available as an add-on module.

IP-Limited Subscription Access

This type of institution-level access presents a special login page to customers accessing from a given IP or from within an IP range. Customers who register or log in through this page will have a special, free subscription added to their account that only provides access when they are accessing the site from that institution's IP or IP range.

This option requires each employee or student to register, and we can provide reporting on the number of accesses for each institution. The login pages and welcome emails sent to customers accessing from this type of institution can be customized to each specific institution.

This is available as an add-on module.

Sub Account Subscription Access

This type of institution-level access is configured with a "master account" in Clickshare with a specialized subscription. This master subscription can only be added by Customer Service Representatives through Clickshare's administrative interface, and can be configured on a subscription-by-subscription basis to have any number of additional, linked "sub accounts" by Customer Service Representatives.

Sub accounts can be created and managed by Customer Service Representatives, or by customers through the customer-facing pages. The sub accounts will continue to have access for as long as the master subscription in the master account is active, and only the master account needs to have billing information as it is the only account charged for the access.

This type of institution-level access is not IP-limited, so sub accounts can be created and used from anywhere in the world.

This is available as an add-on module.