HCL Digital Solutions

I created a git repository with some smaller CSS files to fix some annoyances within HCL Connections.

I started with this to prevent Orient Me to load fonts from external URLs or Elasticsearch Metrics to break the UI on larger screens. These issues are solved after the last updates I got from support, but Blogs and Tailored Experience Wizard can be improved with some simple rules.

After rebooting the Kubernetes server for HCL Connections Componentpack, I sometimes see that Orient Me is not working and just shows:

{"error":{"statusCode":500,"message":"Internal Server Error"}}

CVE-2021-44228 was a very serious problem end of 2021, and we are still finding new occurrences, or security teams scan servers and find vulnerable log4j files. Don’t get me wrong most of these occurrences are not vulnerable any more, because the JVM is hardened like in the Elasticsearch 7 containers, or they use of the JVM parameter -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true.

Today I got the question of how to disable the highlights app in Connections 7. When you follow the documentation for Connections 6.0CR6 you get an error message (and the document is not available in Connections 7).

I commented out the widget definition in widgets-config.xml like described in the documentation for the former release.

Our users are often building Highlights and Overview pages within HCL Connections Communities, where they link from one description widget to RTE or from one RTE widget to another.

We found that these anchor links often disappear behind the top navigation bar and the users wonder what happened.

In late 2021 I had an HCL Connections environment starting swapping, because the AppCluster used more than 30 GB of memory.

The system has

• two nodes
• is installed with the medium-sized deployment option
• About 7500 users with a high adoption rate, because Connections is also used as intranet