Educates
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Customer and partner enablement

Customers and partners learn your product hands-on, under your brand

For enablement and DevRel leads who train the engineers at their customers and partners.

Give each audience a training portal with your title, logo and theme, and each person in it a Session of their own to use the product in. Run it at your events, or leave it open as an academy people come back to whenever they need it.

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The problem

  1. Trials lose people before their first success

    A trial starts with a setup guide, a cluster to create and credentials to sort out. Many people give up before they reach the part of the product you wanted them to see.

  2. One portal for every audience

    Partners need the advanced material, a customer needs the workshops for what they bought, and the public needs the introduction. One portal means one catalog and one set of limits for all of them, so someone always sees too much or too little.

  3. Training drifts from the product

    The product ships every few weeks and the training was written two releases ago. Commands, versions and screenshots stop matching, and nobody notices until an engineer at a partner gets stuck.

How Educates fits

  • A portal for each audience

    Give partners, a key customer and the public a training portal each, with its own title, logo, theme and hostname, its own event access code, and its own cap on how many Sessions run at once.

    Portal branding⁠Training portal⁠

  • An academy that runs itself

    Make a portal's catalog public so people can browse before they log in. Sessions expire after a set time or soon after the browser tab is closed, and workshop environments are replaced on a schedule, so a portal sized for a few dozen Sessions at once serves many more people over time.

    Training portal⁠Ready Sessions⁠

  • Inside your own website

    Keep the catalog on your own site, which asks the portal's REST API for a Session and shows it in an iframe on your HTTPS pages. With the lookup service in front of several portals and clusters, one API serves them all, with a tenant for each customer.

    Portal REST API⁠Embedding⁠Lookup service⁠

  • Workshops that keep up with the product

    Workshops are Markdown in Git, reviewed and versioned like the product they teach, and published as an OCI image for each version. One workshop can hold several pathways through its pages, and each portal picks the one its audience follows. To see what gets used, record usage in Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity or Amplitude, or post events to a webhook of yours.

    Publishing workshops⁠Workshop instructions⁠Workshop analytics⁠

For the Builder

How it works

There are two ways to put workshops in front of customers and partners, and they work side by side.

  1. A portal per audience. Each audience gets a TrainingPortal of its own, with its own branding, access code and limits, like the partner portal below. People register an account, or with anonymous access just enter the code.
  2. Your website as the front end. Turn off the portal's own registration and let your site request Sessions through the REST API, passing its own user IDs so a returning person gets their Session back, and an index URL so people land back on your site when they finish. Show the Session in a new tab, or in an iframe on your HTTPS pages. With many portals, or a cluster per customer, put the lookup service in front of them.

This portal gives partners two workshops under your brand, at their own hostname under the cluster's domain, for up to 40 people at once:

partner-portal.yaml
apiVersion: training.educates.dev/v1beta1
kind: TrainingPortal
metadata:
  name: partner-academy
spec:
  portal:
    title: Partner Academy
    logo: data:image/png;base64,<your logo>
    theme:
      name: partner-theme
    ingress:
      hostname: partners
    password: <partner access code>
    sessions:
      maximum: 40
      registered: 1
  workshops:
    - name: product-fundamentals
      expires: 90m
      orphaned: 15m
    - name: product-advanced
      expires: 2h
      orphaned: 15m

The theme is one of the themes in your Educates configuration. For a public academy, drop the access code, make the catalog public, switch to anonymous access if people should not need an account, and add refresh so each workshop environment is replaced on a schedule. The TrainingPortal reference covers every setting.

A portal open to the public lets in people you do not know. The docs strongly recommend a cluster used only for Educates, and say never to let untrusted users in without Kyverno enforcing its security policies.

What you bring

Educates is the core, not the whole job. This is what it leaves to you, so you can plan for it before you commit.

Proof

Read how it is done

Deploy it from the Hub

The Hub is a catalog of workshops you deploy on your own Educates, each with one command.

Explore the Hub

Try it yourself, or talk to us

Get started runs Educates on your laptop with a first workshop in a few commands. Get help is where you ask the community, and where you can hire the people who build Educates.

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