About WalkMe
WalkMe is an easy-to-use platform for creating interactive on-screen Walk-Thrus that run on top of your actual website or web app. Unlike video tutorials, WalkMe helps users perform real tasks by providing step-by-step, pop-up instructions that guide them through the actual business process. These real-time Walk-Thrus are proven to increase conversion, reduce helpdesk costs and improve customer satisfaction.
The Walk-Thrus are easy to create and publish. They do not require you to learn or use any screen capture or video editing software, nor do they require the user to install any add-on or player in-order to view and use them. Furthermore, unlike video tutorials which force users to switch between screens and
interrupt workflow, WalkMe player is integrated into the UI itself, naturally interacting with your users and mediating between your users and your website or web application’s UI. WalkMe platform also includes a comprehensive analytics data which can be used to learn about a website visitor's behavior and enable analyzing faults and gaps in the website business processes.
For example, when a visitor play a Walk-Thrus for a product purchasing process, the analytics will reveal what is the drop-out rate for each and every step in the process.
WalkMe Modules
WalkMe is comprised of three modules:
WalkMe Editor—the WalkMe editor is a simple and easy-to-use tool for creating and editing Walk-Thrus.
May 2013
WalkMe Player—The WalkMe Player is a discreet on-screen widget that allows end-users to control the visual experience and look of Walk-Thrus. The player is made available to end users as part of the website itself and does not require any configuration or installation. The Self-Hosted solution refers to this module.
WalkMe Analytics—WalkMe Analytics is a sophisticated analytical tool to review the efficiency of Walk-Thru playback data.
What is WalkMe Self Hosted
Overview
WalkMe's customer includes SaaS vendors, and financial institutions that all value highly secure networks and services. Some customers want to keep all of the Walk-Thru information on their servers to disconnect the dependency on outside servers. In response to this need, WalkMe offers its services in another different secure architecture.
How does it works / Architecture overview
Unlike the Pure SaaS Model where the Walk-Thru data is stored on Amazon CDN, the Self Hosted Model differs in that it enables our customers to store Walk-Thru generated files on their own web servers. This allows the end user's browser to download both the customer's website and WalkMe's data from the same web server. WalkMe analytics information will still be sent to WalkMe Servers but this feature can also be disabled if requested, but it will mean that there will be no analytic information for the customer.
In the Self Hosted Model, the Walk-Thru creation process is still being done on WalkMe's servers similar to the process of storing WalkMe's analytics data. In order to copy the generated Walk-Thru files created upon each published event, the customer needs to download these files from WalkMe's back panel and manually place them on the selected webserver. The snippet code is automatically generated to fit with the web server URL in the correct address to enable the downloading of the file.
Security in Self Hosted Model
In Self Hosted model, the customer takes full responsibility of the security for WalkMe files by putting those files on his servers. In Addition, when the adding/updating/removing only of the Walk-Thrus the customer needs to override only the Walk-Thru data files, since those files does not contain any code and only meta data there is no need for extreme security checks while copying those files to the customer servers. In case of a full upgrade to the WalkMe player all of the WalkMe files should be override by the new files.
Deployment
The process is to copy the WalkMe static files into the folder on your server so the first step you should do is to create a folder in your server.
1. Create a Folder in your server where the WalkMe files will be saved
2. Go to https://account.walkme.com and login to your account. 3. Click on the self-hosted tab.
4. Enter the URL of the folder you just created (e.g. https://yourserver.com/walkmefolder)
5. Copy the snippet code that appear on the screen. 6. Download the WalkMe files
7. Unzip the files and copy the files into the folder
Updating Process
Updating only the data files:
After changing the Walk-Thrus and publishing the Walk-Thrus again there is no need to copy the entire content of the ZIP file. Override the old data_###.js files in the WalkMe folder on the server with the new data_###.js files.
Updating WalkMe Player version:
In order to update the WalkMe Player version override the entire WalkMe folder on your server with the full content in ZIP file.
WalkMe Pure SaaS Model
The WalkMe SaaS solution model is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS). WalkMe's servers are located on Amazon EC2, while the Walk-Thru details are stored on Amazon RDS. The published content thereafter is saved on Amazon S3 and is instantly deployed to Amazon CloudFront CDN for fast
download rates for all WalkMe end users. In this architecture our clients have zero implementation required and only need to add the WalkMe snippet into the website HTML pages as required (as done in Google Analytics).
Self-Hosted Files
WalkMe_###.js
A static JavaScript file which is the main functions that activates all of the other relevant WalkMe files. The snippet code points to this file.
Setting.txt
A text file that contains a list of data files locations, lib location and widget location.
Data_#####.js
A static javascript file that contains all of the users Walk-Thrus, tasks, LaunchMes data.
This file contains only the metadata and does not contain code. If multi language is supported, you have one data file for each language.
Widget_###.js
A static javascript file that contains the code and CSS of the client's widget (could be Splash, Search, Triangle and so on). Player Folder
The folder contains all the information that the WalkMe Player needs in order to play the Walk-Thrus. For Example: the player lib, the images, etc.
