Content Sources Authentication — Cheat Sheet

A quick cheat sheet to help you get acquainted with the content source authentication process and prepare beforehand if you are planning to index multiple content sources.

No Auth

No content source privileges are needed, apart from the content source's URL. Select it to crawl public content. Crawls the blogs, knowledge articles, threads, and other information that does not require any access rights to view.

Basic Auth

Indexes the data available to the user whose username and password are entered. Admins can either enter the credentials on the screen or in the pop-up window which appears when you click Connect.

OAuth

OAuth is an authentication process that lets you allow one application to interact with another on your behalf without giving away your confidential details. It acts as a high-security authentication for some content sources, such as Khoros (Lithium) communities, Higher Logic communities, and ServiceNow. Usually, this requires an API token or the client ID and client password of the app.

Forms

Form is an advanced version of Basic authentication and requires an acquaintance, on part of the SearchUnify admin, with CSS selectors to set up. You can think of them as guideposts that tell a browser how to interpret data.

Consider the next image, where a pair of tags tells the browser to interpret the text contained within them as a heading and a pair tags tell the browser to interpret the text contained with them as a paragraph. Both are CSS selectors.

In this chart, you can map content sources with available authentication methods.