Social Digital Experience | HCL Digital Experience

The Social Digital Experience that is provided by the HCL social business platform includes social websites with social content, social networking, and social analytics. All these areas are provided secure and in context of enterprise management and governance.

Deliver social capabilities from HCL Connections by using the following features below. Integrated social capabilities enable your portal users to respond faster and more effectively to improve customer satisfaction and organizational effectiveness.

Social rendering

Social rendering improves HCL Connections integration by using HCL Web Content Manager features to query and render HCL Connections content.

Social rendering enables HCL Digital Experience page editors to feature social data that is hosted on a remote HCL Connections server in the context of portal pages.

Page editors can define social lists. A social list shows the results of a specific query for social data from HCL Connections. For example, the social objects can be lists of blog posts, files, or discussion topics. Page editors can control the visual appearance of the social objects in the query result list. They do so by selecting the formatting component of choice from a predefined, yet extensible set of formatting components.

Site designers provide the formatting components and define them in a style that is consistent with your portal pages. They can also customize and extend this set of formatting components. This way your page editors do not need to know the markup generation and CSS styling details of the formatting components. Even without that knowledge, they can still choose from a rich, but consistent set of visual designs for your lists.

As a result, the page editors can focus on assembling meaningful portal pages that are enriched by social data. They select the appropriate content for the individual portal pages and the social lists. They can use inline editing capabilities to select the visual appearance of the social lists. They can also adjust the selection logic of the social lists. For example, they can show the most recent blog entries that are created in the HCL Connections community to which the current page is associated. Page editors can select individual social lists from a set of predefined social list definitions and drop them onto portal pages. When a page editor drops a social list onto a portal page, the corresponding content item that represents the social list definition is copied to the page. The page editor can then modify it independently of other social lists on the same page or other pages.

Social rendering provides you the following components and features:
  • A set of social list definitions
  • Two formatting components for visualizing the social lists in two different ways: a condensed simple list design and a comprehensive list design.
  • Support for desktop, tablet, and smartphone form factors
  • One single federated Tag Cloud for site visitors to find all public tags in HCL Portal, Web Content Manager, and other systems.
You can use the provided sets as starting points for creating your own list definitions and list designs.

Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal

You can use the Digital Data Connector to integrate data that is hosted on external servers on your HCL Portal pages. The Digital Data Connector uses the Web Content Manager presentation components. For example, you can render social content that is aggregated on your HCL Connections server in the context of your portal pages. The use of Web Content Manager presentation components ensures a consistent user experience for your portal site visitors.

The Digital Data Connector can integrate data that is hosted on external servers on your HCL Portal pages. The benefits are as follows:
  • You can integrate items of different content types from multiple sources and mix and aggregate them on your portal pages. For example, the content can range from simple static content to applications, job offers, and workflows.
  • You can provide a role-specific personalized view on your enterprise application and web content to your users by using a single entry point. You can provide all relevant content on a single portal page and target it to the appropriate user profile. This way, you can serve your specific business requirements and help site visitors, customers, or employees to pursue their individual goals more efficiently. For example, site visitors can make faster and better decisions. Employees can complete their individual job tasks more quickly. Site visitors can more easily find target information and applications according to their preferences.
  • Your web designers, content authors, and page editors can efficiently integrate the content into your portal. They can use all Web Content Manager features to present the integrated data without coding skills.

Community pages

You can associate a community in HCL Connections with a portal page. The community is then associated to all portlets, files, and other content on that portal page. Links enable the user to go from the community page to other content that is also associated with the community. You can assign access permissions as required. Community pages have the following benefits:
  • You can infuse HCL Connections social content within the context of personalized content and applications.
  • You provide core social engine and social content capabilities. They include files, profiles, blogs, wikis, forums, activities, bookmarks.
  • You place the Social Digital Experience where and when it can most influence communication and productivity.
  • You can add social lists to your pages that show social information that is related to the page context. In addition to the lists, you can add details pages to your portal and use details portlets to show selected items and provide basic interactions with them. As usual, you can add other non-social portlets as well.
  • Community pages and ad hoc portlets provide seamless experience for portal site visitors by blending web content, applications or transactions, and social capabilities in a unified interface
  • The portal Search Center presents federated results across Portal and Connections.

HCL Connections integration portlets

The HCL Connections 4.5 integration portlets show HCL Connections content in HCL Portal. These portlets deliver a rich set of 13 social software services for use in a portal environment. They make it possible to surface social tools, such as blogs, profiles, communities, and the activity stream in the appropriate context. Website designers can integrate these activities, blogs, bookmarks, communities, forums, profiles, and wiki applications of HCL Connections into HCL Portal. They can also include the Tag Cloud portlet for quick filtering in composite applications. This way, they bring the appropriate cutting-edge social tools to the appropriate website visitor context to build exceptional web experiences and customer satisfaction and loyalty. These social tools also increase the potential of customers to receive the help and answers they need without having to call a customer representative. This way, you can save on call center costs.

The new release of the HCL Connections integration portlets includes the following new and updated capabilities:
  • The Activity Stream portlet, which brings the HCL Connections Activity Stream experience to your HCL Portal pages
  • Enhancements to Ideation Blog support in the Blogs portlet
  • Support for HCL Connections 4.5 servers.

Social Media Publisher

Use Social Media Publisher for Web Content Manager to further socialize your content through external networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social Media Publisher is an extension to Web Content Manager that allows businesses to promote their web content on social networks. It provides the following benefits:
  • Social Media Publisher integrates with external social networks. It supports HCL Connections, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
  • Social Media Publisher also provides some basic statistics about the promoted content.

You need to enable the Social Media Publisher before you use this feature. For information about how to enable and use the Social Media Publisher, read Social Media Publisher in the product documentation.