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Administering Connections 6.5
Welcome to the HCL Connections 6.5 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 HCL Connections™ to fit your environment.
Customizing notifications
The content of the notifications sent by HCL Connections™ is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine.
Editing notification templates
For both the default and CR4 enhanced templates for notifications, you can edit the templates directly to achieve the level of customization you want. The following procedures apply to both sets of templates, and, for the CR4 templates, specific examples are provided.

Administering Connections 6.5
Welcome to the HCL Connections 6.5 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
  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 HCL Connections social networking product.
- Planning
  Before installing HCL Connections™, study the system requirements, deployment options, and documentation conventions.
- Installing
  To install HCL Connections™, you need to follow a detailed series of procedures.
- Uninstalling HCL Connections
  Uninstall HCL Connections.
- Migrating and updating
  Migrate HCL Connections™ and its supporting software to the latest release and then update the installation with the latest deployment, 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 HCL Connections™ to fit your environment.
  - Customization best practices
    Use the following guidelines to help you to implement and manage customizations in your deployment of HCL Connections™.
  - Injecting customizations into Connections pages
    HCL Connections™ Customizer is a proxy service that lets you modify the HCL 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 HCL 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 HCL Connections™ is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine.
    - Customizing basic notification settings (CR4 and later)
      You can change many aspects of notifications in Connections 6.0 CR4 and later by making changes to a common properties file.
    - Customizing shared resources for notifications (default templates)
      You can customize the common style and structure documents that are used by notifications in HCL Connections™.
    - Customizing shared resources for notifications (CR4 templates)
      If you've enabled the Connections 6.0 CR4 common style and structure documents (templates) that are used by notifications, you can customize the notifications as follows.
    - Editing notification templates
      For both the default and CR4 enhanced templates for notifications, you can edit the templates directly to achieve the level of customization you want. The following procedures apply to both sets of templates, and, for the CR4 templates, specific examples are provided.
      - Customizing notifications sent as single emails
        You can customize the standard email messages that are sent by the applications in HCL Connections™, including the auto-generated notifications that are generated by the News application.
      - Customizing email digests
        You can customize the email message that is sent to users as part of the daily and weekly email digests.
      - CR4 notification template reference
        In Connections CR4 and later, the content of individual notifications is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine. You can edit these templates directly in any text editor. The FreeMarker version currently used is 2.3.28.
  - 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.
  - 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
  HCL Connections™ provides a flexible security infrastructure that supports an open, easily shareable data model.
- Mobile
  See the HCL Connections™ Mobile documentation for Connections Cloud and Connections on-premises.
- Developing
  Get information about how to use the APIs provided with HCL 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 HCL 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™.

Editing notification templates

For both the default and CR4 enhanced templates for notifications, you can edit the templates directly to achieve the level of customization you want. The following procedures apply to both sets of templates, and, for the CR4 templates, specific examples are provided.

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