Another new feature with IBM Connections 5.0 CR3

Created:
Last Update:
Author: Christoph Stoettner
Read in about 3 min · 427 words
HCL Connections Mobile wsadmin WebSphere

Fountain pen and a notebook

Photo by Aaron Burden | Unsplash

Within the fixlist of the new released CR3 of IBM Connections 5 there are several new configuration options mentioned. One of the interesting ones for me is the mobile update parameter AllowRemoveAccount. The default value is “false” and your Connections environment still works before, but what’s changed when you set this to true?

The official documentation is already uptodate and shows us:

When you set this option to true, accounts can be removed from a mobile device without requiring the user to login and without any authorization check. The user is asked to confirm the deletion of an account before it is removed.

So this helps me with my long list of Connections environments on my mobile clients. Until you set this to true you can only remove a profile, when you still can login to this system. I have several environments configured on my mobile which i can’t access anymore, because my user is disabled, or the system is only available within special wifi or network environments. So i’m not able to remove these accounts.

I will set this to true in all environments i have access to, to prevent this behavior.

Please beware of the additional infos in the online help:

If a user has existing accounts that they cannot access and that were created before this feature was available, those accounts cannot be deleted using the AllowRemoveAccount property.

Validation error

After checking out the mobile-config.xml (yes you should always use wsadmin to change config parameters), the parameter was not set in the file. So i added it and saved my change.

After checkIn i got a validation error, first i thought the order of parameters was wrong and so i checked the mobile-config.xsd. Even in the xsd the parameter wasn’t mentioned. So i checked <connections-root>/mobile/mobile/mobile/mobile-config/mobile-config.xsd|xml and there the parameter (and the other new ones) is available. I’m sure that the update was finished successfully without errors, so i checked two other systems (Windows and Linux) with CR3 and there was the same behavior, the new parameters were not copied to LotusConnections-config. After manually copying the xml and xsd i could set the values and after restarting of mobile the new feature was available.

When i enabled the feature the first time and i like the xml validation feature of checkIn and checkOut, so i used wsadmin to checkOut the mobile-config.xml

I haven’t checked if the new parameter useLeadingWildcardForGroupTypeahed with LotusConnections-config.xml works, but it isn’t available in the xsd too and i can’t found it in the complete connections-root directory. Will try the next days.

Author

Christoph Stoettner

I work at Vegard IT GmbH as a senior consultant with a focus on collaboration software, Kubernetes, security and automation. I mainly deal with HCL Connections, WebSphere Application Server, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform and Linux.

Sometimes my daily work results in technical talks and blog articles, which you can follow here more or less regularly. You can find the presentations in the main menu under public speaking .

I created a list of tools I use regularly, most of which have been released under an open source license.

In my spare time I read a lot, test all kinds of technical software and gadgets and try to follow about 200 RSS feeds.
Here you can find a collection of them.

This is my private blog, all opinions are my own.

           

Suggested Reading
Aaron Burden: Fountain pen and a notebook

Use OAuth 2.0 token-based authentication with IBM Connections Mobile App

A lot of people don’t like to store credentials in mobile apps or browsers. A good workaround is the usage of OAuth 2.0 tokens, but the application needs to support it and the server you’re talking to too. The IBM Connections Mobile App can use it for authentication.

OAauth2 can be used directly with WebSphere Application Server and Connections 6.0. There are no special OAuth servers or applications needed!

The Documentation at IBM was a little bit confusing for me, there are lots of sidenotes, but you just need to do following steps, to use OAuth 2.0 token-based authentication with the IBM Connections Mobile App.

Created:
Last Update: Read in about 2 min
Aaron Burden: Fountain pen and a notebook

Regexp error during Connections install

This week I installed IBM Connections 5.5CR1 on a Windows Server. I used WebSphere Application Server 8.5.5.9 and everything ran pretty smooth, but the Connections install itself ended in an error after all applications were successfully installed.

Created:
Last Update: Read in about 1 min
Aaron Burden: Fountain pen and a notebook

Command history wsadmin on Linux

Missing command history on Linux is a little problem when using command line utilities like wsadmin, db2, sqlplus and so on.

I found a solution for this today.

You can use rlwrap to get command history for all applications on the console and it is possible to recall and edit the commands. Rlwrap uses readline.

Installation on CentOS: 

yum install readline-static gcc make
tar -xvzf rlwrap-0.41.tar.gz
cd rlwrap-0.41
./configure
make
make install

        


    
    Created:  
    
    

    Last Update: 
    
    

 Read in about 1 min