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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Installing HCL Digital Experience
Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
Roadmaps to deploy your system
Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
Roadmaps for installation and deployment
Installation and deployment roadmaps each include a topology and high-level instructions for setting up a selected development or authoring environment.
Roadmaps for stand-alone servers
A stand-alone server topology is useful for many environments. While the underlying topology is similar for many environments, the configuration steps to achieve a desired environment varies.
Roadmap: Demonstration environment
Ideal for running product, feature, and application demos. After installation, you have an Apache Derby database and a default file-based repository.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
  - Planning to install HCL Digital Experience
    Before you install HCL Digital Experience in a production environment, assess your hardware and software needs, possible database configurations, security options, and LDAP server options.
  - Roadmaps to deploy your system
    Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
    - Roadmaps for installation and deployment
      Installation and deployment roadmaps each include a topology and high-level instructions for setting up a selected development or authoring environment.
      - Roadmaps for stand-alone servers
        A stand-alone server topology is useful for many environments. While the underlying topology is similar for many environments, the configuration steps to achieve a desired environment varies.
        Roadmap: Demonstration environment
        Ideal for running product, feature, and application demos. After installation, you have an Apache Derby database and a default file-based repository.
        Portlet and theme development environment
        This HCL Digital Experience roadmap is ideal for running a portlet and theme development server, which is used to develop and test portlets and themes.
        Roadmap: Test or small production environment
        A stand-alone server topology is ideal for a test or small production environment. In this roadmap, the web server, database, and user registry software are distributed to different physical servers.
      - Roadmap for container-based deployment
        A container-based deployment offers the capability to place them on different physical or virtual machines, on premises or in the cloud.
      - Roadmaps for clusters
        Clusters topologies provide greater availability and capacity.
      - Roadmaps for advanced configurations
        Multiple clusters and portal farms are advanced configurations.
      - Roadmap: Web content servers
        In this roadmap, the web server, database, and user registry software are distributed to different physical servers.
    - Roadmap: Applying maintenance
      Portal maintenance is delivered through individual fixes (Fixes) and Combined Cumulative Fixes (CFs), which is recommended to your environment.
    - Roadmaps for migration
      Choose the appropriate migration roadmap for your environment.
  - Migrating to IBM WebSphere Application Server 9.0.5
    If you are installing the latest version of HCL Digital Experience, migrate your IBM WebSphere Application Server to 9.0.5.
  - Installing and preparing the prerequisite software
    Before you install HCL Digital Experience, make sure that the prerequisite software is installed, configured, and has the required fix packs applied.
  - Installing the HCL Digital Experience software
    The HCL Digital Experience is designed to help create, manage, simplify, and integrate your processes into an engaging online experience.
- Configuring
  Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
- Backup and restore
  Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
- Migrating
  Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
- Integrating
  Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
- Administering
  Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
- Securing
  Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
- Monitoring
  HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
- Setting up a website
  Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
- Staging to production
  During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
- Developing
  This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

HCL Digital Experience roadmap: Demonstration environment

Ideal for running product, feature, and application demos. After installation, you have an Apache Derby database and a default file-based repository.

Who should use this roadmap

Use this roadmap if you are an organization with the following requirements:

An organization that needs to explore new features or functions.
An organization that needs to demonstrate HCL Portal to customers, clients, or colleagues.
An organization that needs an environment to demonstrate applications and designs.
If you need to demonstrate a specific database or user registry, use the Stand-alone server roadmap

Topology diagram

A demonstration environment is a portal server with a local database. Since Apache Derby is installed, configured, and ready for use, a database is not included in the topology diagram.

This topology diagram contains only one portal server.

Preparing for the installation process

Gather information and software before you install HCL Digital Experience.

Procedure

Check product system requirements.
Log in to HCL Software Support and get the software.

Installing the HCL Digital Experience

Installing HCL Digital Experience involves preparing your operating system, installing or upgrading the installation manager, and running the installation program. Visit Installing the HCL Digital Experience software for more topic information.

Applying the latest cumulative fix

Portal maintenance is delivered through individual fixes (Fixes) and Combined Cumulative Fixes (CFs), which is recommended to your environment.

Tuning the servers in your environment

Tuning the servers is important to the performance of your portal environment. HCL Portal is not tuned for a production environment after installation and deployment. Your database needs tuning for improved performance. You can organize your database now or soon after you finish your configuration. You need to tune and maintain your database on a regular basis.

Procedure

Run the performance tuning tool to complete an initial tuning of your servers.