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Administering Connections 6 CR6
Welcome to the HCL Connections 6 CR6 documentation. HCL Connections is social networking software designed for the workplace. Its features help you to establish dynamic networks that connect you to the people and information you need to achieve your business goals.
Customizing
Customize IBM® Connections to fit your environment.
Customizing Metrics reports
Metrics data displays as reports, which you can customize for your organization. When you install IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence to support the Metrics application, a set of standard reports is immediately available. You can customize the standard reports by editing the configuration file that defines each report’s layout. In addition, you can use IBM Cognos Report Studio to create new reports.
Creating a report from a blank layout
Use IBM® Cognos® Report Studio to create a report from a blank layout for the Metrics application to display. Creating a report from a blank layout requires you to add report components manually; although this type of report involves more work than a predefined layout, it provides greater flexibility.

Administering Connections 6 CR6
Welcome to the HCL Connections 6 CR6 documentation. HCL Connections is social networking software designed for the workplace. Its features help you to establish dynamic networks that connect you to the people and information you need to achieve your business goals.
- What's new in HCL Connections 6
  Find out about features that are new or updated in this release of HCL Connections.
- Product overview
  Learn how to deploy, customize, and administer the IBM Connections social networking product.
- Planning
  Before installing HCL Connections™, study the system requirements, deployment options, and documentation conventions.
- Installing
  To install IBM® Connections, you need to follow a detailed series of procedures.
- Migrating and updating
  Migrate IBM® Connections and its supporting software to the latest release and then update the installation with the latest interim fixes or Cumulative Refresh (CR).
- Administering
  Run administration and maintenance tasks to keep your environment up-to-date. For example, learn how to customize your deployment or how to use the wsadmin utility to edit configuration files. You can also schedule tasks, maintain application databases, moderate content, or manage users and their roles.
- Customizing
  Customize IBM® Connections to fit your environment.
  - Customization best practices
    Use the following guidelines to help you to implement and manage customizations in your deployment of IBM® Connections.
  - Injecting customizations into Connections pages
    IBM Connections™ Customizer is a proxy service that lets you modify the IBM Connections user experience. Customizer intercepts and modifies requests from clients and responses from servers, so it can customize anything that flows through it, such as the behavior of APIs or the look-and-feel of the user interface.
  - Customizing the user interface
    The procedure to customize IBM® Connections is the same for each application. You must edit a copy of the relevant source file and save it in the appropriate customization directory.
  - Customizing notifications
    The content of the notifications sent by IBM® Connections is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine.
  - Adding new ways to share content
    Create your own gadgets and add them to the Share dialog.
  - Customizing a blog theme
    Customize a blog theme to change the look of a blog. Or create a new theme and make it available to your blog users.
  - Customizing Metrics reports
    Metrics data displays as reports, which you can customize for your organization. When you install IBM® Cognos® Business Intelligence to support the Metrics application, a set of standard reports is immediately available. You can customize the standard reports by editing the configuration file that defines each report’s layout. In addition, you can use IBM Cognos Report Studio to create new reports.
    - Modifying reports
      IBM® Connections provides several ways to customize the reports that display in the Metrics user interface. In addition to creating new reports, you can modify the text labels and links used in existing reports, as well as nest reports or group them under a custom title.
    - Creating a report from a predefined layout
      Use IBM® Cognos® Report Studio to create a simple report based on a predefined layout.
    - Creating a report from a blank layout
      Use IBM® Cognos® Report Studio to create a report from a blank layout for the Metrics application to display. Creating a report from a blank layout requires you to add report components manually; although this type of report involves more work than a predefined layout, it provides greater flexibility.
      - Creating a blank report from the PowerCube model
        Rather than creating a report based on a predefined layout, you can create a blank layout and then choose which report components to include.
      - Adding a layout component to a blank report
        The layout defines the appearance of the report, including formatting, style, and design.
      - Adding a chart to a blank report
        Add a data chart to a report's layout.
      - Adding a crosstab to a blank report
      - Adding a dimensional calculation to a blank report
        Create a report using a dimensional calculation to query the PowerCube and retrieve the tuple representing the intersection between different dimensions of the data.
    - Adding custom reports to the Metrics reports list
      After you create a custom report, edit the reports-config.xml and add an entry for the new report. The entries in this file determine which reports appear in the list that displays in the Metrics user interface.
    - Nesting reports in the Metrics user interface
      You can nest reports in the Metrics reports listing by nesting the corresponding entries in the reports-config.xml file. For example, if you create several custom reports related to a particular theme, you can nest them in the reports listing so that users can easily see that the indented reports are related.
    - Creating categories for reports
      You can group related reports in the Metrics reports listing by adding the report entries under a special category entry in the reports-config.xml file. For example, if you create several custom reports related to a particular theme, you can group them in the reports listing so that users can easily see that the reports are related.
    - PowerCube dimensions
      The data collected by IBM® Collections is stored in a PowerCube that is administered by IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence. The PowerCube stores data in dimensions, which provide descriptive information as well as quantitative measures of the data. When designing reports for displaying Metrics data in IBM Connections, you can include data from both the Regular (categories) and the Measure dimensions.
  - Customizing Profiles
    Customize the Profiles application to define the core data model for people within your deployment and tailor the presentation of profile content to meet your organization’s requirements.
  - Using Profiles and Communities business cards
    Extend your web application by integrating the Profiles and Communities business cards in to the application.
  - Customizing the Wikis welcome page
    Customize the welcome page of the Wikis application.
  - Post-customization step
    Edit a configuration property so users see your changes the next time they log in, without having to clear their web browser cache.
- Security
  IBM® Connections provides a flexible security infrastructure that supports an open, easily shareable data model.
- Mobile
  See the IBM Connections Mobile documentation for Connections Cloud and Connections on-premises.
- Developing
  Get information about how to use the APIs provided with IBM® Connections and how to use Connections Customizer to modify the Connections pages that are returned to users.
- Troubleshooting and support
  To isolate and resolve problems with your IBM® products, you can use the troubleshooting and support information. This information contains instructions for using the problem-determination resources that are provided with your IBM products, including HCL Connections™.

Creating a report from a blank layout

Use IBM® Cognos® Report Studio to create a report from a blank layout for the Metrics application to display. Creating a report from a blank layout requires you to add report components manually; although this type of report involves more work than a predefined layout, it provides greater flexibility.

About this task

The instructions that follow demonstrate how to create a report from a blank layout using Cognos® Report Studio and then add different features to the base layout. The examples are independent and do not have to be completed in sequence.

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