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.
To install HCL Connections™, you need to follow a detailed series of procedures.
After installation, you need to perform further tasks to ensure an efficient deployment.
You must perform additional tasks to enable HCL Connections for the Orient Me home page, the Touchpoint interactive user experience, Community Libraries, Community Surveys, Metrics applications, and more.
The Component Pack for HCL Connections™ introduces new connectivity capabilities that enhance collaboration and boost productivity.
Activities Plus is the first third-party application integrated with Component Pack. Activities Plus is the team collaboration tool (replacement of Connections Activities) that makes work easier and more intuitive.
Find out about features that are new or updated in this release of HCL Connections.
Learn how to deploy, customize, and administer the HCL Connections social networking product.
Before installing HCL Connections™, study the system requirements, deployment options, and documentation conventions.
Review the steps that are required to install HCL Connections.
Complete the following tasks before installing HCL Connections. If you are migrating from a prior release of HCL Connections, do not complete the tasks for creating databases or populating the Profiles database. The migration process handles those tasks automatically.
Select the HCL Connections applications that you plan to use and install them in a clustered deployment.
Register all custom and third-party widgets starting with HCL Connections™ 6 CR1 \IFR1 to ensure they meet security requirements and can display in communities.
Review the size of the Java™ Virtual Machine heap and adjust it, if necessary, to avoid out-of-memory errors or to suit your hardware capabilities.
When you have successfully installed HCL Connections™ to run on WebSphere® Application Server, you can configure IBM® HTTP Server to handle web traffic.
Create an administrator for Home page so that you can make changes to the application such as adding and removing widgets.
Review the underlying architecture and technologies used by the Component Pack for HCL Connections™.
Component Pack for HCL Connections uses different technologies from Connections and requires additional software.
Perform a fresh installation, upgrade an existing deployment of Component Pack for HCL Connections™, troubleshoot the installation or upgrade process, or uninstall the Component Pack.
Configure the offerings and related components in the Component Pack for HCL Connections™.
If Component Pack for HCL Connections™ is installed in your deployment, you can use the app registry to change the look and content email notifications and newsletters, making them particular to your organization.
Activities Plus in Connections Component Pack (CP) uses the existing Component Pack infrastructure, assuming that you have a working Connections Component Pack environment.
Register OAuth - In order for Actitivites Plus to authenticate with your Connections environment, you must define a new OAuth widget.
Activities Plus for Component Pack deploys a Minio service. To configure the NFS mount, S3 storage mount instructions for Component Pack are provided.
This topic guides as you replace variables in the boards-cp.yaml file with appropriate values.
Add the Activities Plus mobile app to the HCL Connections Mobile application.
If you want to move existing Activities data to Activities Plus, you must run the migration service.
If necessary, you can remove the Activities Plus app from your Connections deployment.
Deploy Elasticsearch as a stand-alone server for use with HCL Connections™, instead of deploying it as part of the Component Pack for Connections.
Enable type-ahead search in HCL Connections™ to suggest items in the search box based on content that is relevant to each user.
This topic describes how to install Customizer Lite. There are two deployment options, hereby referred to as Customizer Lite and Customizer Lite HA. Customizer Lite – the most basic deployment using a single Docker node running a single instance of each required service, and Customizer Lite HA – a more resilient deployment using a pair (or more) of Docker nodes all running instances of each required service with requests load balanced across available nodes.
If you installed the Connections Content Manager add-on, you must configure FileNet® to work with Connections Content Manager. Choose the instructions that match your deployment: either an existing FileNet deployment, which you installed independently before you installed HCL Connections or a new, integrated FileNet deployment that is part of a new HCL Connections installation.
You can enable community members to edit files in Community libraries online if you have already installed HCL Connections Docs.
If you want to be able to conduct surveys within Communities to capture data and share it easily with your community in an activity stream, enable Community Surveys.
HCL Connections 6.5 can use the optional Tiny Editors: TinyMCE or Textbox.io, to replace the HCL Connections™ default rich text editor.
To enable full indexing of data, copy the Search conversion tools to local nodes.
Complete the post-installation tasks that are relevant to your deployment.
Uninstall HCL Connections.
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).
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.
Customize HCL Connections™ to fit your environment.
HCL Connections™ provides a flexible security infrastructure that supports an open, easily shareable data model.
See the HCL Connections™ Mobile documentation for Connections Cloud and Connections on-premises.
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.
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™.