Customizing standard notifications

You can customize the standard email messages that are sent by the applications in IBM® Connections, including the auto-generated notifications that are generated by the News application.

Before you begin

Important: Before making any customizations, first back up your original notifications folder. In addition, ensure that any customized files are backed up before performing a product upgrade or applying a cumulative refresh or fix pack, as you might need to merge your changes again manually after making updates.

About this task

The content of individual notifications is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine. You can customize the content of notifications by modifying the existing template files or by replacing the files with custom templates that you create yourself. You can also modify the notification properties files to add custom strings to the templates and modify the images used in the notifications.

Procedure

Customize the content of an email message by completing the following steps.

To customize an existing template file:
1. Locate the FreeMarker template that corresponds to the notification that you want to customize. For more information about the notification types used in IBM Connections, see Configuring notifications.
  Notifications are stored in the following location:
```
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/
```
  where app_server_root is the WebSphere® Application Server installation directory and dm_profile_root is the Deployment Manager profile directory, typically dmgr01.
  You can find folders for each application in this location and a shared resources folder. Look for the FreeMarker template for the notification that you want to customize in the relevant application folder. When you find the template that you want to modify, open the .ftl file in a text editor.
2. Make your customizations to the template as needed. For information about editing the templates, refer to the FreeMarker documentation on the following web page:
  http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/docs/index.html
  Note: The FreeMarker version currently used is 2.3.15.
3. Save your changes and then close the file.
4. Synchronize all the nodes using the Integrated Solutions Console.
5. Stop and restart the News application.
To edit the text strings used in the notification:
1. Using a text editor, open the notification_language_code.properties files in one of the following directories and make your changes:
  - Application-specific strings:
```
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/application_name/resources/nls
```
  - Shared strings:
```
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/resources/nls
```
  Where language_code is the locale of the language. For example, notification_fr.properties.
  Tip: To see where each string that you are editing is used, look at the .ftl template files in the same directory and check the statements with the following format:
  u.resource("key")
  where key is the key of a translated string in the resource bundle notification_language_code.properties files.
  Note that the notification framework will look in the application-specific resources folder before moving to the shared strings in the shared resources folder.
2. Save your changes and then close the files.
3. Synchronize all the nodes using the Integrated Solutions Console.
4. Stop and restart the News application.
To customize the images used in the notification:
1. Locate the images in one of the following directories:
  - Application-specific images:
```
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/application_name/resources/images
```
  - Shared images:
```
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/news/notifications/resources/images
```
  Note that the application-specific images are loaded before images in the shared location. If an image is loaded from the application-specific folder, the shared location is not checked for that image.
2. Replace any image that you want to customize with your own version using the same file name.
  The images are sent as MIME attachments to each email digest, so ensure that the image size is small.
3. Synchronize all the nodes using the Integrated Solutions Console.
4. Stop and restart the News application.