For a large retail corporation that manages 800+ vendors and thousands of external users, there is a constant threat of information leaks. An End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) is a way to deter theft of intellectual property and protect against legal action.
Objective
Present users who are accessing the site with a EULA that requires a digital signature before proceeding.
Overview
The premise behind this functionality is quite simple: display a EULA for the user to read and confirm that the user is in agreement with the EULA before allowing them to proceed to the site. A record of every user who has read the EULA and agreed to its terms will need to be kept for legal purposes.
Obstacles
- The EULA is a dynamic document that changes with the business. A new or updated EULA may be posted at any time.
- Users cannot be expected to sign the EULA upon every attempt to access the site. However, users will need to be aware of any updates to the EULA upon next access attempt.
Solution
To update the EULA, an administrator will simply need to access and edit the file, in this case named "Terms of Use" and saved in the Site Pages library. The changes will be picked up automatically by the HTML page that displays the text.
A slightly more complicated task is to make sure that users have been presented with the latest EULA. To accomplish this, a record of each user is kept, which contains a unique user ID, user details, and, most importantly, the last modified date of the record. Each time the user logs in, the user information from the record is retrieved and compared against the Terms of Use file. If the Terms of Use has a Modified date that is more recent than the Modified value in the record, then the user is presented with the new EULA and is required to sign off before accessing the site.
The secondary purpose of the EULA record is for a legal record of who has accessed the site and to ensure that he or she was presented with the latest EULA at the time of login.