KB User's Guide - General Info - Internal and External Live Sites

This document explains the difference in the appearance of live KnowledgeBase sites.

Live Site URLs

The URL for the external site look like this: kb.wisc.edu/yourgroupsitenamehere/ , e.g. https://kb.wisc.edu/kbGuide/.

The URL for the internal site look like this: kb.wisc.edu/yourgroupsitenamehere/internal/ , e.g. https://kb.wisc.edu/kbGuide/internal/.

Differences Between an External and Internal Site

The external site can be accessed by the public, specifically, anyone with access to the internet.

Publicly available documents on your external site may be indexed by search engines, such as Google, allowing users to find them through web searches. 

Note: If desired, search engine indexing can be disabled using the Allow Crawler Indexing setting. For details, refer to the General Group Settings section of KB User's Guide - Settings Tab - Editing Your Group Space Settings

The internal site can only be accessed by the following authorized individuals:

Users with valid campus credentials can authenticate to your internal site, but access is limited to external documents and documents that have been published with the Campus Access setting enabled. Other internal documents will remain unavailable unless the user has been granted additional access.

An internal KB site will also include the following:

  • A "SIGN OUT" link in the upper right-hand corner.
  • The following links in the footer:

Changing the Appearance of the Live Site(s)

If you are an admin for your KB group space, there are a number of ways you can customize your internal and external sites to present different options to site visitors. Please see the below resources for more information:


Keywords:
campus credentials kb space kb group kb subsite live public internal external publicly accessible available index web search authenticate sign out 
Doc ID:
22400
Owned by:
Leah S. in KB User's Guide
Created:
2012-01-25
Updated:
2026-09-24
Sites:
KB User's Guide