Use Cases and Examples | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• Examples of how to leverage consumer auth with different Yext-built experiences

In this unit we will walk through some examples so you can get a sense of how these features would be implemented in real-world scenarios.

Example 1:

Turtlehead Tacos wants to create a Search experience that is only available to their employees. They want Yext to build and host the whole site but want basic password protection on the site.

• To implement something like this, the customer would use Yext Sites and add a Password Authentication policy to the Site so that only those with the global password would have access.

Example 2:

A healthcare company wants to use Yext Search to search internal assets. Each of these assets has permissions at the user level that they want to extend into search. Depending on who is running the search the search results will change. They want this to work with their existing SSO.

There are 2 ways to implement this use case.

• If you do not want to host your site with Yext (using Sites), you can configure your existing SSO solution to pass external identities to Search when a user logs in to only display the relevant assets.
• If you do want to integrate with Sites, configuring a SAML integration between the existing SSO and Yext would allow you to use your existing SSO to log users in, but then easily set up Yext Auth to integrate with authorized search. The customer can use External Authorization AND/OR Yext Auth (depending how the permissions are stored on entities) to configure which assets are returned in Search.

Example 3:

A financial company wants to use Yext Search to search Sharepoint documents. Each Sharepoint document has a user group ID associated with it, and you want to permission search results using these user groups.

• External Authorization is key for this situation. There are two options to choose from.
  • You can host your website outside of Yext, and grab a user’s identity however you choose. These external identifiers are then passed to Search to use for External Authentication.
  • You can integrate with Yext Sites and manage your users with Yext Auth. Identity will be passed with user log-in and by associating external identities on Yext users, Search can respect External Authorization.

Example 4:

Yext wants to create an internal YextBook application where users can run searches and view pages but then also log in to the platform to make changes on their own profile in Yext Content.

• This customer will have to manage their users in Yext using Yext Auth (or using a SAML integration with Yext Auth and their existing SSO). The YextBook Site will be protected by Yext Auth so only employees can access it. Each Yext User will have permissions in the platform to view and update only their entity and fields they are allowed to update.

Example 5:

Yext wants to create a help website where some information is fully public, some is only available to employees, and some is only available to actual customers.

• The customer would create a public website (outside of Yext), with the option of logging in if you are an employee or customer. Attached to each searcher is an identity that signifies if they are a public user (not logged-in) or identity if the user is logged-in to signify if they are an employee or customer. To implement, Yext will use External Identities and External Authorization.

Now that you have a sense of what is possible with Consumer Authorization with Yext, we recommend checking out our guides to learn more details about implementation!