Let your community members connect to eXo with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or Twitter
When you have an open community, such as your customers or a user group for your products and services, you often want to let people sign up as quickly and easily as possible.
But filling in a sign-up form with personal information is often the last barrier where people give up, whether it’s for privacy concerns, because it’s yet another username and password to remember or simply because they don’t have time! We have all become very demanding on the web. We expect things to happen smoothly and quickly.
Content
But there is a better way. You can let your visitors sign up with just two clicks and without even choosing a username and password. Wouldn’t that provide a better experience? Wouldn’t that help your community to grow faster?
eXo Platform 4.3 can do just that for you.
Easy Sign-Up
On the login screen, we have added icons to connect with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
With the billions of members of these social networks, there is a high probability that your visitors will have an account on at least one of them. They trust these networks to hold their online identity, and so they will be more inclined to use one of them to connect to a new online site like yours.
So by clicking an icon, your visitors will be taken to their favorite social network where they can authorize eXo to access their data.
Once authorized, eXo will look at only what is necessary (email address, first name and last name) from the social network to create a user account on the fly before logging them in. No further action is required. It’s an instant sign-up process!
Instant Sign-In
As a community manager all you have to do is to focus on animating a lively community to keep your members interested. And if you are doing a nice job, they will come back.
And here, too, this new feature will work under the hood to improve the user experience. Let me tell you about it.
When someone has previously connected to your community through a social network, they will be able to log back in just by clicking on the icon on the login screen. This time, there is no need for anything to be authorized. As long as they are logged into the social network, they will be recognized by eXo and logged into it without needing to enter their password.
Even better, if the “Stay logged in” switch is set, the next time, it’s zero click. The login screen will not even be displayed! Your members will have continual access to your community with no extra effort!
Connect to more social networks
Under the hood, this feature works with the well-known oauth protocol that is supported by all major social networks and works thanks to OIDC.
And like everything we do at eXo, our engineers have made this functionality extensible.
So, if you have a presence in another oauth-based social network, a developer can easily write a dedicated connector for it. Look at our documentation, because we are preparing a nice tutorial.
How can you give it a try?
Download thelatest preview build, and install and set up the social network providers as shown in our documentation. It’s a built-in feature, so there are no extra add-ons to install to make it work.
Let us know what you think. We would love to get your feedback about this new feature.
Keep an eye on this blog for more docs and product updates.
Join the eXo tribe by registering for the community and get updates, tutorials, support, and access to the Platform and add-on downloads!
eXo Platform 6 Free Datasheet
Download the eXo Platform 6 Datasheet and discover all the features and benefits
I am the product officer at eXo. I oversee product management and product marketing. My teams design, create and promote the features of and improvements to eXo Platform. As a former enterprise software developer turned product manager, I have a passion for how IT can improve people’s lives.
In this blog, I write about some of my personal interests, such as productivity, alternative forms of management and corporate organisations, collaboration, open-source and emerging technologies.