Component Pack offerings
The Component Pack for HCL Connections™ introduces new connectivity capabilities that enhance collaboration and boost productivity.
Customizer
HCL Connections™ Customizer is a proxy service that lets you modify the 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.
Orient Me
The Orient Me home page provides your users with a cognitive view of their most essential Connections content. Orient Me shows users prioritized updates, with content from the people and communities they interact with the most at the top and grouped by source, or viewed as a single stream based on time. The page is fully integrated with an updated Notification Center to truly make the home page a command center for managing time and attention.
Orient Me uses either Elasticsearch or Solr as its default storage backend.
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch service can be installed as a standalone application or as a part of the Component Pack. This service can be used as the storage and retrieval service for the Metrics, Type-ahead Search, Orient Me, and Elastic Stack features.
If you have no need for the offerings that Elasticsearch is enabling you for, you can skip installing Elasticsearch.
- Elasticsearch and Metrics
- Search and metrics capabilities based on Elasticsearch give you greater
insights into your data. If you are an administrator, you can get meaningful
metrics that demonstrate the business value of Connections in your
organization. You can chart Connections events, such as every time that
users read a blog entry, create a To Do item in an Activity, update a wiki
page, or follow a Community. Community owners can also get metrics for the
communities that they own. Track who visits the community, information
shared such as comments, and participation in such activities as downloading
files. Whether your organization is deploying metrics for the first time or
migrating your existing Cognos® metrics data to the new metrics, you can now
visualize your data more easily with the improved interface.Tip: If you plan to use only Metrics and/or Type-ahead Search, you can simplify your deployment by making Elasticsearch a stand-alone installation in Connections. For information, see Setting up stand-alone Elasticsearch. If you initially deployed using the Elasticsearch offering of Component Pack and want to move to a stand-alone Elasticsearch instance, you can migrate your existing Metrics and Type-ahead Search data to the new instance as explained in Migrating Elasticsearch data from Component Pack for Connections.
- Elasticsearch and Type-ahead Search
- Type-ahead remembers where you have been recently so you can find content faster. You can configure type-ahead search using either the stand-alone Elasticsearch server or the Elasticsearch component of the Component Pack. For more information, see Setting up type-ahead search.
- Elasticsearch as a backend for Orient Me
- Starting with Component Pack 6.0.0.9, you can choose to have Elasticsearch store and retrieve your home page top updates instead of Solr.
- Elasticsearch and Elastic Stack
- The Elastic Stack implementation (optional deployment) integrates with the Elasticsearch cluster to provide a centralized logging solution. Additionally, it will install Logstash and Kibana.
Activities Plus (for Connections Activities)
With Activities Plus, your users can view an activity as a board, giving them the option to drag and drop their Tasks and Entries, and filter the content of their boards by person, by priority, by color, and more. Activities Plus uses the existing Component Pack infrastructure and is seamlessly integrated with Connections on-premises applications such as Communities, Files, Activity Streams (Orient Me), and the Connections mobile application. Activities Plus is the team collaboration tool (replacement of Connections Activities) that makes work easier and more intuitive. Existing Connections activities can be converted and imported to boards, where users can continue to work in a more modern and effective way. Activities Plus uses the Mongo database already deployed as part of the Component Pack.