BrainHoney Subscription Manager Integration (SMI) enables you to integrate BrainHoney's content viewer with your existing Subscription Manager (SM) web server so that you can control and authorize end-user access to individual content items within a course. For example, you can create a course with both free and for-purchase content items. Any enrollee of the course can freely access the free content but may access the for-purchase content items only if they have paid. Without SMI configured, any user who is enrolled in a course can freely access all course content items.

You can configure SMI on individual courses, on a domain, or both. Course configuration overrides any domain-level configuration. You can also disable SMI for individual courses as described below.

Each SM must be authorized and approved by the BrainHoney server owners (Agilix). Please contact Agilix to add your SM URL to the list of approved SM servers.

End-users view course content in the Content Player component. If SMI is enabled for the course, the Content Player requests permission from your SM web server before displaying a content item.

The SM reads the request details, determines from its own database whether the end-user can access the content item, and replies to the Content Player either granting or denying the permission. If granted, the Content Player displays the content. If denied, the Content Player redirects the user's browser to an SM-provided denial URL if it exists, otherwise to a generic "access denied" page. An SM-provided denial URL would typically prompt the end-user to buy the content.

Follow the steps in the following sections to enable SMI.

In your Subscription Manager web server, implement a URL that accepts an HTTP POST whose input content-type is text/xml in the Subscription Request format, and whose response is text/xml in the Subscription Response format.

SMs are approved and distributed by the BrainHoney server owner (Agilix). They are created by adding the following XML to the server's root-domain customization.

The id value is a unique identifier for the SM and is the approved ID. Each domain or course that enables SMI for this SM refers to this ID. The url value is the URL to the SM, and timeout value is the maximum number of milliseconds that the BrainHoney server waits for an SM response.

To enable domain-wide SMI, add a valid subscriptionmanager node to your domain customization. See Customizing a Domain for more details about adding nodes to a domain customization. You can also configure individual courses, as described below, if you do not want domain-wide SMI.

Course SMI settings override domain SMI settings, if any. You can enable or disable SMI on a course by adding a subscriptionmanager element to the course's Course Data XML data field.