Sensitive publications often require strict control over timing and audience. This is common in Investor Relations where financial results must be released at the exact intended moment to avoid unintended market impact. Another example is product launch or company update communication where sharing information too early can affect strategy and stakeholder expectations.
This article describes the options available in the platform, as well as tips and tricks, to reduce the risk of unwanted early access or accidental publication.
Table of contents:
- Creating Articles
- Adding documents or other assets
- Publishing article to the wider public
- Additional tips
Creating Articles
Page Settings
When first creating a new Page make sure to check these options in the Add Page Settings:
- Restrict access to sensitive articles and campaigns to only those team members that need access. The bigger your team gets, the more important this is.
- 'Confidential' Articles set to 'Confidential' cannot be published as long as this setting is active.
Embargo
Go to the Publish Options and enable the Embargo option to place a security wall (username and password) in front of the article. Only those with the credentials can view the page.
Preview URL
Articles in 'draft' mode contain a preview URL, with the word 'preview' followed by a long, unique, unguessable alphanumeric string. This makes it impossible for users to guess the URL to an article not ready for publication. As soon as you publish the article, this 'preview hash' is removed from the URL automatically. Draft articles are not visible in Presspage RSS feeds and cannot be searched for in the newsroom.
SEO Options
The SEO options let you add a 'no-index' meta tag to individual articles. However, you will need to make sure to remove this tag once you publish the article. This makes it a fault-sensitive measure.
Adding documents or other assets
Assets URLs
When you upload documents, make sure that its URL cannot be guessed. The platform automatically takes care of this by adding a long unique alphanumeric string (UUID) to the URL of any asset uploaded to the Asset Manager. As soon as you upload anything to the Asset Manager within a published article or Newsroom, it will be visible in the Media Library, unless you have disabled this option in your settings (see below).
Exclude from the Media Library
The Media Library section of your newsroom shows uploaded documents and images. Enable the option "Exclude from the Media Library" by default in the Account Advanced Settings to make sure that images need to be explicitly published to the Media Library.
Adding Assets to Articles
Add documents in the correct order when creating article pages:
- Create an article in drafts first,
- Then add the multimedia modules in the article: Inline Image, Image gallery, and/or Download Module.
- Only upload the multimedia assets (documents, images, video files) from your computer directly to the module.
Do not upload the media assets to the Asset Manager first and add the Multimedia module afterwards .
This principle applies to documents, images and/or video files.
Publishing article to the wider public
When publishing the page to the wider public, ensure all safety measurements are disabled:
- Confidential, wait until the expiry date has passed or manually overwrite the status.
- Embargo, disable the embargo option on the publish options.
- SEO options, remove the no-index meta tag.
The preview URL of the page and added media assets will automatically be changed to live links once the article is published.
Sync the publication and distribution
Make sure all information gets published simultaneously. In Presspage, you can send out your article as an email campaign, ensuring they are linked together.
Display published articles from your Presspage newsroom on your main corporate website by using an RSS feed.
Additional tips
Besides the above best practices, there are some additional tips for your internal processes.
- The use of multi-factor authentication is mandatory. This dramatically decreases the chance of user accounts getting hacked, making sure that nobody else can get into your account and read information they should not have access to.
- Users with Administrator rights should review their list of Presspage users regularly. You should remove users that left the company, or who should not have access anymore.
- Schedule a dry run with non-sensitive information to practice, so everybody can understand how the process works. Document your internal process and share it with the team.
- Educate your fellow colleagues on how your team uses Presspage, so everyone else does not rely on that single key user who knows everything.