Administer IBM Connections 

Customize IBM Connections to meet the needs of your organization.

Administer the IBM Connections applications from the WAS.

The following sections discuss the areas of the product that you can configure and administer. Refer to an application-specific section for information about administering that application. Settings that apply to all of the applications are covered in the Administer applications section.

What's new in version 3.0.1?

The following administration topics have been updated in version 3.0.1 or describe new version 3.0.1 features.

IBM Connections:

• You can now add Sametime awareness to IBM Connections through the Sametime server as long as there is a server running in your environment. You do not have to have a Sametime client installed.

• A new administrative command was added that you can use to clear and restart all scheduled tasks. See Clearing all scheduled tasks for more details.

Activities:

• There are no new features for Activities in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

Blogs:

• When global moderation is enabled, global moderators can review blog posts and comments from a central interface.

Bookmarks:

• There is a new configuration property favicon.ajaxproxy.intranet.enabled that lets you specify whether to load intranet bookmark favicons via direct network access or via the ajax proxy.

Communities:

• You can now designate an alternate owner for the communities and subcommunities owned by a specific user.

• When community moderation is enabled, global moderators or community moderators can review community blog, forum, and file content before it is posted to a community, or manage content after it is added to a community.

• You can configure and customize the Media Gallery widget to manage how community members share photo and video content.

• You can enable the Custom Library widget to allow community members to work with documents and folders on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.

Files:

• There are no new features for Files in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

Forums:

• When forum global moderation is enabled, a designated moderator or global moderator can review posts before they are published to a forum and manage posts after they are added to a forum.

Home page:

• There are no new features for the Home page in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

News:

• There are no new features for the News repository in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

Profiles:

• By creating a custom source repository connector, you can integrate data from non-LDAP sources when you are populating Profiles with user data.

• You can configure tuning parameters to adjust the behavior of the type-ahead tool that is used for Profiles search on the Directory page.

• The name of the property used to change the display order of the full report-to chain on the Reporting Structure page has changed.

Search:

• You can add third-party search options to the Search menu in IBM Connections by configuring settings in the LotusConnections-config.xml file.

Wikis:

• Sametime was integrated into Wikis in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

What was new in version 3?

The following administration topics were updated in version 3 or describe new version 3 features.

IBM Connections:

• Manage user data has been simplified. You can now identify users who have left the organization and keep other user data, such as user name or email changes in sync between the application databases and the user directory. See Manage users for more details.

• Email digest support has been added. Users can select how often and to what address email notifications are sent from IBM Connections. Find out how administrators can enable customers to specify email preferences.

• The following new search parameters have been added to the LotusConnections-config.xml file:

  • search.ignore.punctuation.enabled

  • search.language.sensitivity.enabled

  • search.Queue_Max

  • search.Transaction_Max
    

• See Common configuration properties for descriptions of these properties.

• The properties formerly used to specify the location of customized files, such as the header and footer, have been removed from the LotusConnections-config.xml file because they can no longer be used to customize the product. See Customize the user interface for information about how to customize the product.

• If you do not want to make the social analytics widgets available in the Communities, Home page, and Profiles applications, you can disable the social analytics service by configuring properties in the LotusConnections-config.xml file. You can also exclude specific users from the social analytics service if required.

• If you install a subset of the available IBM Connections applications, manually remove the help sections for the applications that you did not install from the user help system. See Remove sections from the help system's table of contents for more details.

Activities:

• Activities is no longer using the Quartz scheduler for its scheduled tasks. Instead, it is using the WAS scheduling service, which is also used by the Communities, Files, Forums, News, Search, and Wikis applications.

Blogs:

• Moderation has been significantly improved in this release to give more control to the administrator to moderate information or to delegate the work. For details, see Manage moderated blog entries and comments.

• You can now assign reviewers to a moderator role so they can review flagged content. For details see Roles.

• New configuration options let you assign reviewers for each category of flagged content. For details, see Manage flagged content for a blog.

• A new wsadmin command lets you replace broken URLs in a Blogs deployment. For details, see Replacing URLs in Blogs.

Bookmarks:

• New metrics are available for Bookmarks. For more information, see View and collect Bookmarks metrics.

• The Bookmarks form now uses a plain text editor to improve performance. To configure it to use a rich text editor, see Configure the 4-in-1 bookmark form.

• You can now delete links by URL and configure Bookmarks to send a notification to bookmark owners before deleting links. For more information, see Delete unnecessary links.

• Run a command to replace URLs in bookmarks to correct broken links. For more informations, see Replacing URLs in bookmarks.

• Supply a custom default icon for bookmarks not already associated with an icon. For details, see Configure favicons and changing the default favicon.

• If enabled by an administrator, users can notify all bookmarks owners about a broken link. For more information, see Manage links.

Communities:

• Many of the commands used to administer and manage communities can now also be used with subcommunities. See individual topics for more details.

• Improvements to community membership management mean that you can now remove a specified user from all their communities and subcommunities. For more information, see Remove a user from communities.

• If you want community owners to invite people to join communities rather than adding them without their consent, you can disable the ability to add new members to a community.

• You can update configuration settings in the communities-policy.xml file to disable the community invitation feature. For more information, see Disable community invitations.

• If you do not want community owners to be able to create a direct web address for their communities or subcommunities, you can remove this feature from the user interface by disabling the community handle.

• When recovering from a database failure, a new command is available to help you ensure that data is correctly synchronized when files have been shared with communities from the Files application, and those communities do not contain the Files widget. For more information, see Restore communities with remote applications.

• New metrics are available for the Communities application, allowing you to access statistics relating to the use of bookmarks, feeds, and tags in communities. For more information, see View and collect Communities metrics.

• The new community-creator role allows you to control who can create communities. By default, this role is mapped to everyone.

• New commands are available to help you to ensure a consistent data state for communities and their associated forums in the event of a database failure. For more information, see Recovering from a database failure.

Files:

• The Files application no longer automatically synchronizes the Files database directory with the IBM Connections server directory. Use the new synchronization administrative commands to synchronize the databases. See Synchronize user data using administrative commands.

• The icon associated with a file type is now controlled by a Cascading Style-Sheet rule. You can no longer assign an IBM Connections icon to a specific MIME type. For more information, see Customize file type icons.

• There are new metrics available, including metrics on folders and items within folders. For more information, see Files metrics

• Notification emails are now sent for more and different reasons than in the previous release. Also, the email templates are now programmed in FreeMarker template language instead of XML. For more information see Customize email templates

• Files now uses the WAS scheduling service.

• Administrators can now restrict what file types are uploaded. See Restricting file types in Files.

• Administrators can now optionally enable inline downloading in secure environments to extend usage of hosted file attachments. The default is false. See Displaying files inline.

Administer Forums

Home page:

• You can control whether your users have access to the Widgets tab. For more information, see Enable and disable the Widgets tab.

• New metrics are available for the Home page application. For more information, see View and collect Home page metrics.

• New administrative commands enable you to set the Getting Started tab to be the default tab for all users or for a subset of users. For more information, see Forcing the Getting Started tab to be the default Home page tab.

News:

• You can use administrative commands to manage scheduled tasks for the news repository. For more information, see Manage scheduled tasks for the news repository.

• A new MBean command allows you to manually reallocate and load balance users in the different email address groups used by the email digest.

Profiles:

• You can use IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator connectors to develop your own assembly-line scripts when you need to provide a specific type of function. For more information, see Developing custom Tivoli Directory Integrator assembly lines for Profiles.

• By modifying settings in profiles-policy.xml, you can control which profile types have access to features such as the board, tagging, networking, following, and others. For more information about the features that you can configure by profile type, see Configure features by profile type.

• You can customize the delete logic that you want to use when deleting users from the Profiles database by defining a custom assembly line that contains the logic.

• The Profiles user interface contains new widgets that you can enable, disable, move, or edit as needed. For more information about the widgets that you can edit in the Profiles application, see Manage widgets in Profiles.

• You can configure the Profiles object cache by editing settings in the profiles-config.xml file.

• New metrics are available for the Profiles application. For more information, see View and collect Profiles metrics.

• New administrative commands are available to help you manage the Profiles event log. You can also define the interval at which events are deleted from the Profiles database and specify how often the event log clean-up task is run. For more information, see Configure event log clean-up for Profiles.

• You can add a setting to the profiles-config.xml file to specify whether information relating to the following feature is made public or not. For more information, see Exposing information about following.

• In this release, you can reverse the display order of the full report-to chain on the Reporting Structure page.

• Advanced settings allow you to control the character limit of your users' board entries, and also set limits for how many characters actually display in the Profiles interface for board entries and comments. For more information, see Configure board character limits for Profiles.

• When Profiles is configured to prevent profile data from being accessible to readers, you can still make user photos cachable. For more information, see Making photos cachable in secure environments.

Search:

• Several changes have been made to the way that search indexes content. Indexing tasks are scheduled and run in the same way, but there are some important topology changes. See The indexing process for an overview.

• A new globalization setting for the search feature enables users to perform language-insensitive searches. For more information, see Search and globalization.

• You can create indexing tasks and run one-off tasks for the social analytics feature. For more information, see Configure indexing tasks for the social analytics widgets.

• New SearchService commands are available for performing file content retrieval tasks. See Retrieve file content for more information.

• Use the deleteApplicationIndex command means that you can avoid deleting and recreating the entire index when there is a problem with the indexed content from any of the applications. For more information, see Purging content from the index.

• Create a stand-alone index allows you to remove inconsistencies from your search index without the need for downtime while the search index is rebuilt.

• When you are removing a node from a cluster, the new SearchService.removeIndexingNode wsadmin command allows you to remove the node from the index management table. For more information, see Remove a node from the index management table.

• Instead of manually copying the search index to a backup location, you can back up the search index using SearchService administrative commands. For more information, see Backing up the search index using wsadmin commands.

• By configuring index backup settings, you can specify the type of index backup to create and whether you want to run a shell script or third-party application on completion of the backup task.

• IBM Connections now supports the indexing of file content from the Wikis application. In addition, the setMaxCacheEntries command allows you to set the maximum number of cached file entries allowed in the database cache. For more information, see Configure file attachment indexing settings.

• You can optionally configure a temporary directory on each node for storing the files for indexing. See Configure multiple nodes for indexing files for more information.

• The search-config.xml file now contains a configurable setting for specifying the maximum number of seedlist threads used when crawling. For more information, see Configure the number of crawling threads.

• New metrics are available for the search application. For more information, see Viewing search metrics.

Wikis:

• The Wikis application no longer automatically synchronizes the Wikis database directory with the IBM Connections server directory. Use the new synchronization administrative commands to synchronize the databases. See Synchronize user data using administrative commands.

• There are new metrics available. For more information, see Wikis metrics

• Notification emails are now sent for more and different reasons than in the previous release. Also, the email templates are now programmed in FreeMarker template language instead of XML. For more information see Customize email templates

• Administrators can now restrict what attachment file types are uploaded. See Restricting attachment file types in Wikis.
  Administer applications
  The wsadmin utility is a tool provided with WAS that you can use to manage applications hosted by the WAS, including IBM Connections.

  Administer Activities
  Configure Activities to best meet the needs of your environment.

  Administer Blogs
  Administer site-wide settings for Blogs from either the Blogs user interface or via the wsadmin client.

  Administer Bookmarks
  You configure and administer Bookmarks using scripts accessed using the wsadmin client. Changes to Bookmarks configuration settings require a restart of the Bookmarks server before they take effect. Changes made using administrative commands take effect immediately.

  Administer Communities
  You configure and administer Communities using scripts accessed using the IBM WAS wsadmin client.

  Administer Files
  You administer Files using the wsadmin client to specify properties in a configuration file, or run administrative commands.

  Administer Forums
  Use the wsadmin client to administer Forums by specifying properties in a configuration file or running administrative commands.

  Administer the Home page
  Administer site-wide settings for the Home page either from the Home page Administration user interface or using the wsadmin client.

  Administer Profiles
  Profiles provides two types of administrative capabilities: configuration settings and administrative commands. You change configuration settings and execute administrative commands by running scripts from the wsadmin command line.

  Administer Wikis
  You administer Wikis using the wsadmin client to specify properties in a configuration file, or run administrative commands.

  Administer infrastructure applications
  You can administer infrastructure applications, such as the Search application and the News repository, by running administrative commands from the wsadmin command line.

  Starting the wsadmin client - reuse
  This topic is just meant to be the source of the steps to be reused in an ordered list instead of substeps.
  

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