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Administering Connections 6.5 CR1
Welcome to the HCL Connections documentation site. 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.
Installing
To install HCL Connections™, you need to follow a detailed series of procedures.
Post-installation tasks
After installation, you need to perform further tasks to ensure an efficient deployment.
Configuring additional HCL Connections applications
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.
Component Pack for Connections™
The Component Pack for HCL Connections™ introduces several offerings that enhance collaboration and boost productivity. Read on to understand the offerings, what resources Component Pack requires, sizing considerations for Kubernetes, and a high-level installation roadmap.
Prerequisites for Component Pack
On a very high level, to install and successfully run HCL Component Pack, you will need HCL Connections plus the following additional resources:
Sizing the Kubernetes cluster
Before you start sizing Kubernetes, let's consider the Component Pack requirements, operations, master nodes versus worker nodes, and availability.
Sizing for a single-node environment
This topic offers best practices for sizing Kubernetes for the default installation of Component Pack for HCL Connections in a single-node environment.

Administering Connections 6.5 CR1
Welcome to the HCL Connections documentation site. 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.
  - The installation process
    Review the steps that are required to install HCL Connections.
  - Pre-installation tasks
    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.
  - Installing HCL Connections
    Select the HCL Connections applications that you plan to use and install them in a clustered deployment.
  - Post-installation tasks
    After installation, you need to perform further tasks to ensure an efficient deployment.
    - Registering custom widgets
      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.
    - Reviewing the JVM heap size
      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.
    - Configuring IBM® HTTP Server
      When you have successfully installed HCL Connections™ to run on WebSphere® Application Server, you can configure IBM® HTTP Server to handle web traffic.
    - Configuring the Home page administrator
      Create an administrator for Home page so that you can make changes to the application such as adding and removing widgets.
    - Configuring additional HCL Connections applications
      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.
      - Component Pack for Connections™
        The Component Pack for HCL Connections™ introduces several offerings that enhance collaboration and boost productivity. Read on to understand the offerings, what resources Component Pack requires, sizing considerations for Kubernetes, and a high-level installation roadmap.
        Component Pack offerings
        The Component Pack for HCL Connections™ introduces new connectivity capabilities that enhance collaboration and boost productivity.
        Understanding Component Pack infrastructure
        Component Pack for HCL Connections™ is both designed and deployed upon a different software stack from Connections. Therefore, it requires a separate hardware infrastructure. Its architecture consists of three main components.
        Prerequisites for Component Pack
        On a very high level, to install and successfully run HCL Component Pack, you will need HCL Connections plus the following additional resources:
        Sizing the Kubernetes cluster
        Before you start sizing Kubernetes, let's consider the Component Pack requirements, operations, master nodes versus worker nodes, and availability.
        Sizing for a single-node environment
        This topic offers best practices for sizing Kubernetes for the default installation of Component Pack for HCL Connections in a single-node environment.
        Sizing for a production-grade cluster
        This topic offers best practices for sizing Kubernetes for a production-grade, high-availabliliy cluster.
        Suggested topologies for production clusters
        Plan your production-grade Component Pack deployment according to your needs.
        Component Pack installation roadmap
        Persistent volumes
        The Orient Me, Elasticsearch, and Customizer components for HCL Connections require you to create persistent volumes.
        Configuring the mail service (SPNEGO only)
        If your environment uses a Microsoft Exchange Server and is configured for SPNEGO, you can optionally choose to configure the Component Pack mail service to enable additional features on the Orient Me homepage (Orient Mail calendar bar and Action Center calendar integration). Complete this task to generate required Kerberos keytab and conf files that will be used during the Component Pack installation.
        Installing and upgrading Component Pack
        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.
        Configuring the Component Pack
        Configure the offerings and related components in the Component Pack for HCL Connections™.
        Customizing email notifications using the app registry
        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.
        Integrating third-party applications: Activities Plus
        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.
      - Setting up stand-alone Elasticsearch
        Deploy Elasticsearch as a stand-alone server for use with HCL Connections™, instead of deploying it as part of the Component Pack for Connections.
      - Setting up type-ahead search
        Enable type-ahead search in HCL Connections™ to suggest items in the search box based on content that is relevant to each user.
      - Installing Customizer Lite
        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.
      - Configuring Connections Content Manager for Libraries
        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.
      - Optional: Configuring HCL Connections Docs with CCM
        You can enable community members to edit files in Community libraries online if you have already installed HCL Connections Docs.
      - Installing Community Surveys
        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.
  - Optional: Installing and configuring Tiny Editors for HCL Connections
    The Tiny editors are alternative rich-text editors which can be installed for HCL Connections™. They provide additional features and extensive customization options not available with the default editor.
  - Optional post-installation tasks
    Complete the post-installation tasks that are relevant to your deployment.
- 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.
- 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 HCL products, including HCL Connections™.

Sizing Kubernetes for a single-node environment

This topic offers best practices for sizing Kubernetes for the default installation of Component Pack for HCL Connections in a single-node environment.

If your decision is to go with a single-node environment (so called all-in-one) and default installation of the Component Pack (installing all Component Pack offerings on a single machine running Kubernetes master and enabled to schedule non-system pods as well as a worker), we advise:

At least 16 CPUs
At least 64G of RAM
At least 50G of disk space used for persistent volumes for Elasticsearch, Customizer, MongoDB, Zookeeper, and Solr indexes

If you are using AWS, we advise using an m4.4xlarge type of instance.

HCL's benchmarking proved that this type of installation can support up to 200 users. However, this type of installation is not recommended for production environments.

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