With a custom domain, Ans offers users from your school the ability to access the platform using your unique domain name, such as 'ans.yourschoolname.com'. In addition, we also support various domain extensions such as '.nl' or '.be'. This feature ensures a seamless experience for both employees and students. Moreover, using your own domain enables you to send emails through it, enhancing the authenticity of the emails received by users.
To ensure consistent policy across all our customers, we always enforce the usage of "ans" as the subdomain. Users can easily identify the software being referred to and this provides clarity for students and teachers who use Ans across multiple institutions on how to navigate to the Ans platform.
The main benefits of having a custom domain include:
- Users will be automatically redirected to your Single Sign-On (SSO) provider when they access the custom domain. This eliminates the need for users to go through the Ans sign-in page and manually select their school from a list, streamlining the login process.
- Using a custom domain helps establish a stronger integration within your school and therefore ensures a seamless experience.
- Emails sent through Ans will bear the school's domain, enhancing the credibility and trustworthiness of communication received by users.
- When using a custom domain, there is no need to whitelist the ans.app domain in lockdown solutions.
Prerequisite
Before you can set up a custom domain for Ans, you need to have a Single Sign-On (SSO) method configured. This can be done through SURFconext, Edugain, or your own SAML configuration. If you wish to configure your own SAML SSO provider, you can find detailed instructions in this article.
To configure your custom domain, we will arrange a call between a technical expert from Ans and a technical person from your institution. It is important that the technical person from your institution has the necessary permissions to modify DNS records, as some DNS changes will need to be made. In order to access Ans from your custom domain, you will need to add one TXT record and one CNAME record. A sample configuration is provided in the screenshot below.
After setting up your custom domain, you have the option to enforce it, by using your own domain. When enabling this option, users trying to access https://ans.app will be redirected to your own domain. Please note that a custom domain can only be set up on the production environment of Ans (https://ans.app).
Ans will check if the DNS changes have propagated every hour. Ans will start sending emails directly from your own domain, once the DNS changes have been picked up.
Impact on integrations
Once the custom domain is setup, you may need to make some changes to your integrations. Below is a list of integrations and their potential impact. We recommend conducting thorough testing of the custom domain before enforcing it for all users.
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API
When enforcing the usage of your custom domain, you will need to change the API endpoints to also use the custom domain, as requests to https://ans.app will be redirected to your custom domain. -
Readspeaker
The Readspeaker integration will only work on whitelisted domains. You will need to whitelist "ans.yourschoolname.com". -
Proctorio
The Proctorio integration is not impacted as Ans will use the domain the student is accessing Ans from when starting the Proctorio session. -
ProctorExam
The ProctorExam integration is not impacted as Ans will use the domain the student is accessing Ans from when starting the ProctorExam session. The events sent by ProctorExam to Ans to notify Ans of any changes in ProctorExam will continue to work with the "ans.app" domain and do not need to be changed to your custom domain. -
Safe Exam Browser
The Safe Exam Browser integration is not impacted as Ans will automatically whitelist the domain the student is accessing Ans from.
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