What's new in this release? 

Lists the new features in IBM Connections.

IBM Connections 3.0.1

What's new in installing?

• If you are using an earlier version of the product, you can migrate from version 2.5 or upgrade from version 3.0.

• During the installation procedure, you can customize the names of your application servers.

What's new in using?

IBM Connections:

• Some users can moderate Blogs, Forums, and community Files content. The administrator must give appropriate access.

• Search now excludes inactive users by default. To include inactive users in search results, perform an advanced search from Profiles.

Activities:

• You can now see who a to-do item is assigned to when the views are collapsed.

Blogs:

The following feature is new for IBM Connections 3.0.1.

• Use an Ideation Blog within a community to generate ideas on a particular topic and then collect feedback to get consensus on the best ideas.

Bookmarks:

There are no new features for Bookmarks in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

Communities:

• Community members can upload and share photos and videos with the rest of the community using the new MediaGallery widget.

• Add an Ideation Blog to your community is a useful way to encourage community members to share and vote on ideas related to the community's area of interest.

• The Communities moderation interface gives community owners greater control over the content of their communities. If owner moderation is enabled and you are a community owner, you can review and manage the content of community blogs, files, and forums directly from your community.

• When global moderation is enabled, global moderators can review community blogs, forum posts, and files from a central location.

• If you are a community owner, you can add a custom library to your community to enable members to work with documents and folders on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) servers.

Files:

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

Forums:

• Forum owners can share the responsibility of forum ownership by adding additional owners to a forum.

• If owner moderation is enabled, forum owners can moderate the content of stand-alone forums, and community owners can moderate forum content in the communities that they own. For more information, see Forum moderation.

• When flagging forum content as inappropriate, a new option is available in the user interface to allow users to categorize the issue that they are reporting. This option only displays when it is enabled by the IBM Connections administrator.

Home page:

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

Profiles:

There are no new features for Profiles in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

Wikis:

Sametime was integrated into Wikis in IBM Connections 3.0.1.

What's new in administering?

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.

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's new in customizing?

What's new in security?

• The default settings of the proxy configuration file have changed; requests for data from external web sites are disabled. This means, for example, that feeds that users add to a community are disabled by default. Remove the commenting in the proxy configuration file to allow GET requests to be sent to external sites.

• The SPNEGO authentication mechanism is supported for SiteMinder.

What's new in developing?

Common API

There are no new common APIs being introduced for this release.

Activities

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Blogs

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Bookmarks

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Communities

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Files

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Forums

• The documentation has been updated to cover working with members.

News repository

• Activity Streams extensions to News repository feeds

Profiles

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Search

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Wikis

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

• Service SPI

• User SPI

What's new in extending?

• The IBM Connections Plug-in for Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows is enhanced to allow you to interact with Connections using the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector.

• The IBM Connections Files Connector allows you to access Connections files from your Lotus Notes sidebar.

What's new in troubleshooting and support?

• New tips are provided to help you troubleshoot issues with IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator.

IBM Connections 3

• Discussion forums are available outside of Communities as a stand-alone application called Forums. You can still use forums within communities as well.

• The Communities, Home page, and Profiles applications have been enhanced with social analytics widgets that help you find information and people of interest. The widgets called Recommendations, Do You Know, Things in Common, and Who Connects Us inform you about people or information that might be of interest based on your current interests.

• You can choose the updates that get sent to you by choosing which people or items you want to follow.

• Users now have the option to define how they want to receive notifications sent by the product.

• The Bookmarks, Communities, Files, Forums, and Wikis applications are now available from your mobile device, more capabilities have been added to the Profiles application, and you can now access the information of most importance to you more quickly from the Home page application. The list of supported devices has expanded to include devices running the Android operating system.

• Support for auditing and compliance were added to the product in this release through the availability of Event SPIs. You can use the SPIs to process events generated by the IBM Connections applications when content is created, updated, or deleted. See Event SPI for more details.

• After changing configuration files, be sure to update the value of the version stamp configuration property. You must perform this step for your users to be able to see the changes you have made in their browsers.

• For information about system requirement changes, such as any new browsers being supported, follow the link from the IBM Connections system requirements topic to the system requirements techdoc for this release.

What's new in installing?

• Install a network deployment has been simplified and made more flexible. The dmgr (DM) component of WAS controls the addition of nodes and clusters to the deployment, thus eliminating several manual installation steps.

  • Run the installation wizard on the DM with managed nodes rather than on unmanaged stand-alone nodes

  • Install multiple nodes in a single installation procedure

  • Add or remove nodes and clusters after installation without needing to unfederate nodes

• The installation wizard is replaced by the IBM Rational Installation Manager. This tool simplifies the installation and configuration of IBM Connections 3.0.

• A non-root user can install and update the product.

• A new checklist topic helps you to record important details of the installed environment.

• The stand-alone deployment option is no longer available with IBM Connections. Only a network deployment is possible with IBM Connections 3.0. This deployment option simplifies the installation and configuration of IBM Connections.

• The pilot deployment option is no longer provided with IBM Connections.

• Migrating from the IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 pilot deployment to IBM Connections 3 is not supported. You can migrate a pilot to the 2.5 production deployment and then migrate to IBM Connections 3.

• If the Profiles application is installed, the Profiles database is automatically selected as the user directory. There is no longer an option during installation to choose either the Profiles database or the LDAP directory as the user directory. You can still change the user directory after installation. The profiles.directory.service.extension.enabled parameter is enabled by default.

• The SPNEGO authentication mechanism is supported for Kerberos and IBM Tivoli Access Manager.

• Improved index management:

  • Manage indexes across multiple nodes

  • Configure temporary directories for indexes on each node

  • Removed a node from the index management table when it is removed from a cluster

  • Create scheduled tasks to back up the index

  • Purge indexed content for individual applications instead of needing to delete and recreate the whole index

What's new in using?

IBM Connections:

• There is one new application: Forums.

• The navigation bar has changed. There are still direct links to the Home page, Profiles, and Communities applications; the other applications are available from the Apps menu. The menu options have also been enhanced to enable you to perform common tasks directly from the menu.

• The tag cloud has been updated; you can now search the cloud for a specific tag and can search for multiple tags.

Activities:

• You can add the members of a community to an activity either while creating the activity or afterward.

• You can also restrict access for a community activity to a subset of members.

• The Recent Updates view has moved to its own tab. Click the Recent Updates tab to see what has been going on in your activities.

• It is easier to find specific activities. When using the Next button at the bottom of the activity list to page through the activities, you can now increase the number of activities displayed per page to up to 100 by clicking a number at the bottom of the activities list.

Blogs:

The following features are new or updated for IBM Connections 3.

• A new editor makes it easier to author blog entries and enhance them with pictures and videos.

• The redesigned moderation interface lets you review and manage blog entries and comments for your blog.

• Autosave saves your work in progress and reminds you when you have unsaved work so you can resume editing.

• A new feature lets you track blog activity by following a blog .

Bookmarks:

• Updated notification gives you more options for notifying other users about a broken link.

• The Enhanced bookmark form makes it easier to tag a bookmark and add it to another service.

• View the Most Visited Bookmarks list of bookmarks from the Public Bookmarks page with the option to view the whole list.

• My Bookmarks is now the default page for Bookmarks, making it easier for you to access your links.

Communities:

The following features are new or updated for Communities in IBM Connections 3.

• Community owners can invite people to join their community. Members of public communities can also send invitations to people who they think might be interested in becoming community members.

• If you want to bring together a subset of members within a community, you can create a subcommunity. You must be a community owner to create a subcommunity.

• You can now follow communities that you are interested in to get the latest updates from those communities in the Home page news feed.

• When creating community activities, you can add a subset of members to the activity and select the role that those members will have, or you can share the activity with an entire community.

• When you are logged in and you open the Communities application, you are now brought directly to the My Communities page.

• Enhancements to community forums mean that community owners can now add multiple forums to a community, and lock forums and topics. Community members can also perform additional tasks, such as flagging forum content as inappropriate and marking forum topics as questions.

• The new Files widget allows you to share files from the Files application with your communities, and to upload them from your local computer.

• The Recommendations widget suggests communities for you to join based on your existing community membership, network connections, and tags.

• New filtering options are available on the My Communities page, allowing you to display communities that you are a member of, communities that you own, and communities that you are following.

• Improvements have been made to the notification process whereby community owners receive an email notification when someone requests to join a moderated community. When the community owner clicks the link in the email to accept the user's request, the name of the person requesting membership is automatically added to the Members field in the Add Members form.

• When you apply a theme to a community, the theme is now also applied to the community blog, wiki, and forums, providing visual consistency when you are working with communities and community content.

• The Community Actions menu provides more functionality than in previous releases. Depending on your membership role, you can access options for joining, leaving, customizing, deleting, or mailing a community by selecting the relevant option from this menu. This menu is also now available from the community wiki, blog, and forums in this release.

Files:

The following features are new or updated for Files in IBM Connections 3.0.

• The navigation box contains links to the different file views, for example My Files and Public Files.

• Collections are now called Folders and are visible in the navigation box.

• Click the thumbtack icon next to your favorite files and folders to add them to the Pinned Files or Pinned Folders views.

• Move files to the trash to remove them from Files. Files in the Trash view are not permanently deleted, but no one else can see them in Files.

• Open a file or folder and click Follow to get emailed when the file or folder is updated.

• People you have recently shared files with are now suggested to you when you type names in a text box.

• Drag files from the list into folders shown in the navigation box.

• Click Customize at the top of a list of files to select the columns to display.

• The amount of space you are using (and how much you have left) is now shown in the My Files view, below the list of files.

• You can give everyone permission to contribute to a public folder. From your public folder, click Share, and then click Everyone can contribute to this folder. All logged in users can then contribute to the folder.

• The Manager access role is renamed Owner.

Home page:

The following features are new or updated for the Home page in IBM Connections 3.

• The navigation on the Updates tab has moved to the side of the page, where new filtering options are available to make it easier for you to keep up with the latest updates.

• Each of the sections on the Updates tab now has a separate URL so you can bookmark the sections that interest you most and navigate directly to them later.

• The My Page tab is now called the Widgets tab. The functionality of the page is the same, and you can still add and remove widgets as before, only the name has changed.

• The Getting Started tab provides an introduction to IBM Connections and helps you to get started with the product. Use this tab when you are a new or inexperienced user and you want to familiarize yourself with the different applications.

• The Recommendations widget on the Updates tab suggests content from the different applications that might interest you. Use the recommendations to help you to expand your network and find content that is relevant to you.

• You can follow people and content to get the latest updates. The concept of following replaces the watchlist that was available from the Home page in previous releases. Select News Feed on the Updates tab to access the latest updates for the people and content that you are following.

• The My To-Do List widget has changed from a calendar format to a list format, making it easy for you to quickly scan your to-do items and prioritize them as needed.

• Any URLs provided in status updates are now linked so that you can access them at a single click.

Profiles:

The following features are new or updated for Profiles in IBM Connections 3.

• Updates to the navigation allow you to navigate directly to any page in Profiles by clicking Profiles in the product navigation bar and selecting the page that you want to go to.

• You can now follow people that you are interested in to get their latest updates. Following people is a great way to keep up with their latest news updates and interests.

• The Profiles Home page has been replaced by the Directory page, which allows you to search your company's directory to find the people and expertise that you need. You can access the latest status updates from the people in your network and the people that you are following by going to the Home page and selecting Status Updates on the Updates tab.

• The Directory page also replaces the Profiles Advanced Search option that was available from the search control in previous releases. Use this page as your starting point when you want to perform a targeted search based on multiple search fields.

• Profiles provides enhanced social analytic information to help you find out what links you to the other people in your organization and to expand your social network. Use the Do You Know, Things in Common, and Who Connects Us widgets to help you decide if you want to connect with people, and to find out more about what you have in common with your colleagues.

• The availability of the new My Network page means that your network contacts are now just a click away.

• The design of the My Profile page has been enhanced. The twisties used in the previous release have been replaced by tabs, reducing the need for scrolling and making it easier for you to navigate between the different areas of your profile.

• Improvements to the profile editing experience mean that you can now edit your profile directly from your profile page. Point to your profile photo and click the icon that displays to update your profile photo. Click Edit My Profile to access options for updating your contact information, background details, and other areas of your profile. The process for saving profile changes has also been improved.

• When users leave the organization, the administrator can set their status to inactive. When you view the profile of inactive users, they are flagged as inactive, and their profile photo is no longer available.

Wikis:

The following features are new or updated for Wikis in IBM Connections 3.0.

• You can find a wiki by selecting Go to Wiki in the search menu and typing the title.

• In My Wikis, a new navigation box provides a simple way to see different views of wikis, for example click I'm an Owner to see wikis to which you have Owner access.

• The My Wikis view has a tag cloud.

• The Manager role is renamed Owner.

• You can reorder pages by dragging and dropping them in the navigation tree.

• You can create pages by right-clicking existing pages in the navigation tree and selecting Create Child or Create Peer.

• Wikis uses the new common IBM Connections tag cloud.

• Click Members in the navigation box to open the new membership view and set membership and access. The view has a new layout displaying role information and role filters.

• Community Wikis have a new community theme.

• Community Wikis have a new Community Actions menu.

• You are notified when your wikis reach quota.

• At the bottom of pages, the links for Comments, History of Changes, Attachments, and About have been replaced with tabs. History of Changes is now Versions.

• You now recommend pages using the common IBM Connections recommend feature.

• You can now subscribe to Atom feeds of wikis, pages, attachments, versions, comments, and members. In 2.5 you could only subscribe to versions and comments.

• Wikis has a new editor: CKEditor 3.4

• To be notified by email about edits or comments to a page, click Follow -> Follow this Page. This functionality replaces the Notify me of Page changes/Comments check boxes at the bottom of pages. To be notified about changes to the wiki, click Follow -> Follow this Wiki.

• Moving pages has been made easier with a new Move Page dialog design.

• Site Map has been removed.

• You can find pages edited by a person by opening the Index of a wiki, expanding the Pages section, and clicking Edited by....

• You can search for all public wikis and wikis you are a member of by selecting All Wikis in the search menu.

What's new in administering?

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.

What's new in customizing?

• The way in which you customize the product user interface has been simplified. See Customize the user interface for information about how to customize the product.

• Customize the Getting Started tab that is displayed in the Home page application. Change the content to reflect information that pertains to your organization. See Customize the Getting Started tab for more details.

• The procedure for adding custom strings for widgets in the Communities, Profiles, and Home page applications has been simplified so that you no longer need to work with .zip or .jar files when bundling the strings. You can also use the updated process to rename the tabs in the Home page. For more information, see Add custom strings for widgets and other specified scenarios.

• The steps for adding a custom theme to Communities have been updated.

• The optional hideOnSearchUIForm attribute has been added to the <searchLayout> section of the profiles-config.xml file, allowing you to control whether a custom field displays in the Search the Directory form. For more information about this attribute, see Configure Profiles directory search options.

• You can customize the content of daily and weekly email digests by modifying the existing email digest template files or by creating your own templates from scratch and using those instead. For more information, see Customize email digests.

What's new in security?

• You can specify the types of content for the active content filter to strip from user input in the Blogs and Wikis applications. See Configure the active content filter for Blogs and Wikis.

What's new in developing?

• Files CMIS API

Common API

• An element called <snx:userState> has been added to the <author> and <contributor> elements that identifies whether a person is an active or inactive user.

• You can follow items of interest such as a person, tag, or blog.

Activities

You can add a subset of community members to a community activity. See Add an activity member programmatically for more details.

Blogs

• Moderating blogs programmatically

• Getting a feed of the featured blogs

• Getting a feed of the featured blog posts

Bookmarks

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

Communities

• A new collection called My Invitations is now available from the service document. See Getting the My Invitations feed and Work with community invitations for more information about what you can do with it.

• Work with subcommunities

• Work with remote applications

Files

• The terminology used in the Files application has changed since the 2.5 release. Collections are now referred to as folders. The API documentation has also been updated to refer to folders. However, the API has not changed; it still represents a folder using a collection Atom entry document and "collection" is still used in the resource URIs.

• Moderating community files and comments programmatically

• Work with files in the trash

• Work with versions

• Work with file attachments programmatically

• Getting a feed of your pinned files

• Work with pinned files

• Getting a feed of your pinned folders

• Work with pinned folders

• Getting a feed of file shares

• Getting a feed of folders to which you recently added files

Forums

There is new API associated with the new Forums application. See Forums API.

News repository

• Getting a feed of community updates

• Getting a feed of News Feed updates

• Getting a feed of status updates

Profiles

• The Profiles Administration API has been added to the product. It enables administrators to update any existing profile or add and delete profiles.

• You can retrieve all status messages or the status messages for multiple people at once.

• You can use the activeUsersOnly parameter to limit a profile search to return only currently active users. See Search Profiles programmatically for more details.

• Updated the Update profile entries topic to include information about how to change the values of editable fields.

Search

You can filter search feeds using the new lang parameter. See Getting Search feeds for more details.

Wikis

There are no new APIs being introduced for this application in this release.

• Service provider interfaces that were provided as an add-on to IBM Connections 2.5 have been incorporated into the product in version 3. You can use the SPIs to integrate third-party search engines with IBM Connections. The seedlist feeds for Files and Forums have changed as follows since the 2.5 release:
  Files
  You used to send the request to a different URI depending on whether you wanted to crawl for personal (http://<servername>/files/seedlist/document/personal) or community (http://<servername>/files/seedlist/document/community) files. Now, there is a single URI which enables you to crawl for both types of files: http://<servername>/files/seedlist/myserver

  Forums

  Forums is now a stand-alone application and is no longer dependent on the Communities application. Its URI has changed from http://<servername>/communities/seedlist/forum/myserver to http://<servername>/forums/seedlist/myserver.
  

• Events are generated by each IBM Connections application when content is created, updated or deleted. Using our event SPIs, these events can be processed by third-party tools for auditing and compliance purposes. See Event SPI for more details.

What's new in extending?

• The installation wizard for installing the IBM Connections Connector for IBM Lotus Quickr™ has been updated. For more information, see Use the IBM Lotus Quickr connector installation wizard. The steps for installing the connector in silent mode have also been updated.

• IBM Connections Widget for Microsoft SharePoint is a new widget that lets you upload and share documents from a SharePoint server with community members.

• IBM Connections Status Updates Plug-in for IBM Notes is a new sidebar plug-in that lets you post and view status updates from your IBM client.

• IBM Connections Portlets for WebSphere Portal is significantly enhanced with new portlets for tags and profiles.

• By setting up the trusted certificate, you can ensure that the IBM Connections server trusts the SSL certificate passed from the Confluence server.

• Edit settings in the communities-confluence-config.xml file to configure the number of prefetches that you want to allow from Confluence wikis. For more information, see Configure the number of prefetches.

• The IBM Connections Plug-in for Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows is enhanced to allow you to add documents to wikis as well as to blogs and activities.

What's new in troubleshooting and support?

• You can configure settings in the LotusConnections-config.xml file to avoid out-of-memory issues or other problems caused by long response times from the search application. For more information, see Troubleshooting search-related memory issues.

• A new command is available to enable you to explicitly rebuild the look-aside indexes in the event that the indexes do not get rebuilt or are not synchronized correctly.

• Tips are provided to help you troubleshoot problems that you might encounter when using Tivoli Directory Integrator in conjunction with IBM Connections. For more information, see Troubleshooting problems with Tivoli Directory Integrator.

• When troubleshooting user data propagation, you can perform various steps to ensure that processes are working as they should.

Parent topic

Overview

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