Configuring External Collaboration

External Collaboration allows internal and external users to work together in your IBM® Connections deployment.

About this task

The External Collaboration feature is enabled by default, defined in the LotusConnections-config.xml file with the visitorModelEnabled property set to true. To complete the configuration, you must register external users manually and then add them to the Profiles database. External users must have a special LDAP attribute and Profiles role to identify them as external. For an overview of external collaboration, see the Managing external user access topic.

To configure external collaboration, complete the following steps:

Procedure

  1. Determine where external users are registered in your directory. If necessary, add a new branch to your existing LDAP directory. For more information, see the Using an LDAP branch to store external users topic.
  2. Add external users to your LDAP directory. The registration process differs for each organization and cannot be described here. For more information, see your organization's registration guidelines.
  3. Synchronize your LDAP with the Profiles database. For more information, see the Registering external users with Profiles topic.
  4. (Optional) Allow internal users to collaborate with external users by changing their Profiles roles. For more information, see the Setting user roles topic.

    Internal users cannot, by default, create communities that can have external users as members. All external users must be populated to Connections Profiles via Tivoli Directory Integrator first. After an external user is created, then internal users can invite the external user to collaborate on Communities, Files and Activities, as long as those communities/files/activities are external.

  5. If your deployment does not use an authentication mechanism such as IBM Tivoli® Access Manager or SiteMinder, disable anonymous access to IBM Connections. For more information, see the Forcing users to log in before they can access an application topic.
  6. If you have enabled single sign-on for Tivoli Access Manager with SPNEGO, the authentication on the Tivoli Access Manager server must be set to forms-based authentication when SPNEGO is not present and the external visitor users in the database must match the Tivoli Access Manager imported users. For more information, see the Enabling single sign-on for Tivoli Access Manager with SPNEGO topic.