Two Forms of Access Control
As an admin or content owner, you may want to limit access to some of your content to specific groups or individuals. There are two ways to do this:
Limit Content to Certain Groups
A robust catalog offers content that targets specific groups of people, like manager training tracks that do not apply to individual contributors or events for engineers that do not apply to salespeople. You can use groups to control access to content. Learn more about creating groups for access control.
Hide Content
You can designate content items as hidden, which makes them visible in the content catalog only to users with elevated access (platform admins and organizers). These users see hidden content in the catalog with a crossed-eye icon indicating it is not public.
You can share the URL for hidden content with anyone in your organization, allowing them to access and engage with it directly. However, this approach is sometimes referred to as "security by obscurity" because while it hides the content from casual view, it is not intended to provide robust security since anyone with the link can access the content.
Solution
To set access control on content:
Go to the Content Item: Navigate to the specific content item you want to manage.
2. Open the context menu (button with three dots) and select Edit.
Content item details open - this is the same view you see when creating new content, so you can set access control during the creation process as well.
3. Access Control Options: In the Access Control section, you can select Channel, Hidden, or Hidden and Restricted, Except for the Following Groups:
4. Select one of the following Access Control options:
Channel Content restrictions
Channel Public: The channel and all its included content are only discoverable in the catalog and accessible to everyone unless the channel content has restricted access set, overriding the Public access setting in the content item. If both the channel and the content item in the parent channel are set to Public, then the channel and content item is not hidden or restricted.
Note the helptext below the access control component warns you if your channel has access restrictions that limit the visibility of your content. To share content despite those restrictions select Public instead.
Channel Hidden: The channel is no longer listed for regular users, so it stops appearing in the channels list. That is all this option does.
Any signed-in user who has the direct URL can still open a hidden channel and join it. The help text shown under this option in the product says the same thing: all users can still open the direct URL and join.
Hiding a channel does not hide what is inside it. Content items set to Channel access stay discoverable in the catalog and in search for everyone, exactly as they were before the channel was hidden.
If you need to keep people out rather than simply keep the channel out of the way, set access control on the content items themselves, or use the Hidden and Restricted option below. Group restriction is what limits access; hiding only affects discovery.
Channel Hidden and Restricted, Except for the Following Groups: The channel is not listed for regular users, and it is not accessible to them even with a direct URL link. Opening the link returns a not-found page.
Users must be in one of the selected groups to view the channel and engage with its content. Admins, organizers, and channel owners keep access regardless of group membership.
A content owner who is not in one of those groups cannot open the channel, although they can still open their own content item by its direct URL.
This option requires you to specify the groups with access to the content in the "Selected Groups" field.
The three options are mutually exclusive. Choosing Hidden clears any groups you had selected, and choosing Hidden and Restricted replaces plain hiding with group restriction.
Channel vs Content Access Settings - what wins?
As an example, if a channel is restricted to the Sales group, but a content item within that channel is specifically set to allow access only to the HR team, the content item's access settings will take precedence. In this scenario, only the HR team can access the content, not Sales.
Conversely, if a content item is set to public access but resides within a channel restricted to the HR and Engineering groups, the channel's restrictions will prevail. The outcome, only HR and Engineering groups can access the content, preventing accidental exposure of confidential information.
Note that this precedence is about group restrictions. A hidden channel does not restrict anything, so it never limits the visibility of the content items inside it.
Hidden and Hidden Restricted
Hidden: The content is only visible in the catalog to users with elevated access (organizers, admins, and content owners), users who own the parent channel or facilitate the item, and regular users who have an assignment or enrollment. Caveat with Regular users with no assignment or enrollment, although hidden, the content item can still be accessible if they have a direct URL link. This can occur if a user with access provides a direct link - rare but noteworthy.
Hidden and Restricted, Except for the Following Groups: The content is only visible per the same hidden limitations mentioned in the Hidden point above.
The difference is access is denied to the content item unless users are in a group permitting access. This option requires you to specify the groups with access to the content in the "Selected Groups" field.
Content item access control overrides channels access control, the content item's restrictions always wins between the two.
5. Save your changes.
In summary:
If the content item has specific access controls set, those settings override the channel's restrictions.
If the content item has no specific access settings, the channel's group restrictions determine who can view the content. A channel that is only hidden imposes no restriction.
Go Deeper: Hiding Content vs. Using Groups
Hiding Content: This method is ideal for content that is still being developed or for one-off content items that you want to share via a URL with a select few people. Hidden content is only visible to users with elevated access in the catalog. However, keep in mind that this approach relies on "security by obscurity," as it does not prevent anyone with the link from accessing the content.
Using Groups: Groups provide a long-term, sustainable solution for access control, making content items visible and accessible only to certain groups of people within your organization.
Did you know? You can set up automated workflows to open access to content based on the completion of other content. For example, if you have a course called "Python 101" and an advanced course called "Advanced Python" that is restricted to a group called "Python 101 Complete," you can create a workflow that automatically adds users to the "Python 101 Complete" group upon completing "Python 101." This automation will then ungate or open access to the "Advanced Python" class for those users.
Tracks and Hidden Content
You can include hidden content as part of a track, allowing regular users to consume it within the track. Inline track items are preferable because they do not appear in the catalog for regular users, thus preventing clutter with content that may not be relevant to them.