Introduction

To share and deploy an experience, that experience must first be published by Composer. To publish an experience is to place a copy of that experience into globally accessible cloud storage. It is insufficient for you to manually store your experiences in the cloud. You must let Intuiface do this for you through the act of publishing an experience.

Published Intuiface experiences are placed in Intuiface Cloud Storage. This option is free to use, requires no configuration, and is highly reliable, secure, and fast because it leverages Amazon's AWS S3 infrastructure. 

This article describes everything you need to know to work with Intuiface Cloud Storage.

NOTE: The use of personal AWS S3 buckets was once permitted as an alternative to Intuiface Cloud Storage. This option is no longer available to new Intuiface users but legacy Intuiface accounts can continue to use already-configured personal AWS S3 buckets.

Using Intuiface Cloud Storage

Intuiface Cloud Storage is preconfigured and ready for use as soon as you create an Intuiface account.

As noted above, Intuiface Cloud Storage is built on top of Amazon AWS S3 ("Simple Storage Service"), which offers storage resources in various physical locations - referred to as "regions" by Amazon - around the globe.

Whenever an Intuiface account is created, the geographic location of the user creating that account (determined via the web brower's IP address and a geolocation service) is used to select the closest AWS S3 storage location. This location becomes the default storage location for the Intuiface account.

Viewing your account's default location for Intuiface Cloud Storage

• Visit the "My Experiences" panel of the Share & Deploy Console.
• Click the "Storage Settings" option on the right-hand side of the screen.
  
• Your default AWS S3 storage location is the value of the "Location" field.
  

Changing the AWS S3 storage location used by Intuiface Cloud Storage

This section describes a feature exclusive to Platform Enterprise accounts.

At any point, Platform Enterprise accounts can change the geographic location of AWS S3 storage at both the account level and the experience level. This can also be referred to as a region change.

Why change the location? Often, an IT organization requires all intellectual property storage to be located in-country, and that location may be different from where Composer is used. 

• The account-level storage location is considered the default storage option. Changing the account-level default will affect all new experiences published in Composer but will not affect already published experiences. For already-published experiences, you must change the storage location at the experience level.
• Location change at the experience level takes effect the next time you publish the experience in Composer. This will also result in the deletion of the prior version of the experience from the original storage location.

NOTE: Not all AWS S3 storage regions offered by Amazon are available to Intuiface users.

Changing the account-level storage location (aka the default location)

• View the default AWS S3 storage location for your Intuiface account.
  
• Click the drop-down list and select your preferred location.
  

NOTE: Remember, already-published experiences will continue to be updated in their original storage location, even after the default storage option for an Intuiface account has changed. You must explicitly change the storage location for an experience - see the next section - to move it.

Changing the experience-level storage location

• Open the My Experiences tab of the Share & Deploy Console.
• Select your experience to open its Details panel.
• Click the "Edit current location" button
  
• In the pop-up that appears, select the new storage location using the drop-down list on the right, then click the Save button.
  

Backing up Intuiface Cloud Storage

Intuiface Cloud Storage does not retain a history of experience versions. Only the most recently published instance of an experience is saved. Also, no backup is kept if an experience is deleted from the Share & Deploy Console.

As a result, experience versions should be backed up from the Windows device on which they have been edited in Composer using an independent, user-driven process.