What Are Secondary Organizations?
Secondary organizations are an option for supporting multiple development pipelines simultaneously in Arc XP.
Note
Micro Experiences allows you to have multiple, isolated PageBuilder instances where you can deploy custom or Themes bundles, independently work in parallel, ship changes faster, and reduce risks.
To learn more, see Micro Experiences.
Features
Can be named whatever you like (within existing organization name limits)
Mirror content from your “primary” organization
Contain a dedicated PageBuilder deployer and separate bundle
Linked to your existing Okta (or other identity provider) — log in just once
Separate permissions for managing code in each organization
Serve content to the public on a separate domain, using a separate codebase, from your primary organization
Each secondary organization contains all the environments you see in a primary organization: prod, sandbox, staging and dev and (optionally) outboundfeeds, outboundfeeds-sandbox
Use Cases
Test out Themes. Editors and Developers alike can play around with the Arc Blocks in a scratch organization without affecting your production workflow.
Launch a new website with a separate codebase. Want to launch a new micro-site on a new domain? Want to keep the code separate from your main website? Build it out and launch it in a secondary organization.
Migrate your website to Themes. Themes code can't always be merged in smoothly with non-Themes code. But don't worry — you can build a fresh new codebase in a secondary environment, rebuild your existing website with Arc blocks, and then smoothly cutover from your old one when you're ready. In the meantime, you can continue to iterate on your existing website as before.
Run Themes and non-Themes websites side-by-side. Keep your code clean and optimized. Use Themes where it makes sense, go custom where it doesn't.
The Fine Print
Per your SaaS agreement, secondary organizations may require a monthly fee for the use of additional organizations. As a general rule, this fee will only be added when serving content from a secondary organization. Secondary organizations used only for testing or development purposes, or on a trial basis can have this fee waived.
Limitations
Secondary organizations have some technical limitations. These include:
Secondary organizations do not support Arc Subscriptions or Arc Identity. This means that any websites running out of your secondary organization cannot use these products.
Secondary organizations do not support Resizer v2. There is a workaround available, which is described in Using Resizer v2 on Secondary Organizations.
Secondary organizations do not support IFX. All IFX integrations must run in the primary organization.
Secondary organizations do not support Testing PageBuilder content with Bandito or Clavis. These products can only be used in the primary organization.
Can I have a second Composer and content repository in the second organization?
No, secondary organizations are only available as a code and deployment tool for PageBuilder.
Can content be shared across primary and secondary organizations?
Yes. In fact, it must be. Only the primary organization can store content, so the secondary organization must access the Content API from the primary organization.
To share and manage content across departments within an organization, your editorial staff should continue to use multi-site features within the editorial applications.
Can the secondary organization serve content from the same public domain as a website from the primary organization?
For example, can I run a sub-site out of a certain path structure from my main website?
No. Secondary organizations must run on a domain separate from the domains hosted from the primary organization.
Can I use the dev or staging environments to run a separate domain off of a separate bundle?
No. These are intended to be used for internal development, testing and QA processes only.
How do environments in a secondary organization retrieve content from the primary organization?
Each environment in a secondary organization pulls content from the correspondingly-named environment in the primary organization.
Can secondary organizations also host their own Outbound Feeds?
Yes. When requesting a secondary organization, ensure that you would like outboundfeeds environments added.
What do I need to do to create a secondary organization?
Contact Arc XP Customer Support to discuss a secondary organization. They typically take about two weeks to provision.
What's the difference between using multiple organizations and multiple websites?
Arc XP has robust multi-site features that let you share content and code across multiple websites. There is some overlap between the multi-site feature set and using multiple organizations. You should consider carefully whether a secondary organization is truly necessary before you request it.
The key use cases for having a secondary organization that cannot be accomplished with multi-site features are:
Having separate development teams working on separate code bundles that each map to a unique domain or microsite.
Migrating a website from custom code to a Themes build in parallel to your existing codebase
Multisite | Secondary Organizations | |
|---|---|---|
Can separate content into multiple departments | Yes | No |
Can be used to differentiate permissions | Yes | Partially (PageBuilder + Developer Center only) |
Can run multiple websites on different domains | Yes | Yes |
Can serve content from multiple code bundles simultaneously | No | Yes |
Can serve many similar websites from a single code bundle | Yes | No |
Associated Fees? | Multisite Fee | Multiple Organization Fee* *May be waived if used only for development purposes *May be combined with multi-site fee |
Supported Environments
Secondary organizations can have the same environments as standard primary organizations. However, there is one major functional difference: While primary organizations have Full Environments (Production and Sandbox) that allow for content creation and content storage, secondary organizations do not allow for content creation and storage. Instead, Production in the secondary organization will mirror content from Production in the primary organization; similarly, Sandbox in the secondary organization will mirror content from Sandbox in the primary organization.
Using Resizer v2 on Secondary Organizations
Resizer v2 uses a different authentication method than Resizer v1. It requires that the Resizer domain used and the image content are run out of the same organization, which must be the primary organization.
In order for images to render successfully on a domain running in a secondary organization, you must request a subdomain that can be used only for image resizing.
For example, if your website runs on www.mysite.com, you could request images.mysite.com to be created. You will use image.mysite.com/resizer/v2/ as the path for image rendering. Then, when your website (www.mysite.com) is pointing to your secondary organization, your images (images.mysite.com) can still point to your primary organization, and will authenticate and render as expected.
If you wish to keep your images on www.mysite.com and your launch timing is flexible, contact Arc XP Customer Support for timing information on the availability of this option in the future.
Note
While developing in your secondary organization, before the website in your secondary organization is launched, you may notice that you can use www.mysite.com for successful image rendering. This is expected since www.mysite.com is currently pointing to your primary organization.
However, once you point www.mysite.com to your secondary organization (as part of a launch cutover), images will stop rendering successfully, since www.mysite.com is now rendering from your secondary organization. This is why using a separate subdomain (such as images.mysite.com) is critical to render images successfully once your website is launched from your secondary organization.