Communities

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.

Some time ago I got the tip from HCL Support, that the Create Community button will recognize the role community-creator only when the gatekeeper option CATALOG_CARD_UPDATED is set to false.

This is working, but I had to complain, that this option activates some code, which loads fonts from a CDN instead of the local Connections deployment.

Connections 7 creates the Community Highlights page automatically and sets it as the start page for new communities.

That’s configured in the highway service, which is available for administrative users on https://your_connections_url/connections/config/highway.main.gatekeeper.tiles

Since the update to the new HCL Connections Community Card-Based Overview (Connections 6.0 CR4) I search for a way to hide the button “Create Community” from users without the role “Community-Creator”. This was always possible in the earlier versions of Connections, but the button was shown always since the update.

During the year I mostly forgot about it, but yesterday I opened a case with HCL Connections Support and got immediatly following answer:

Today i thought about creating and deleting some Communities with the REST API. Works really good and i need to post my findings sometimes.

First cool thing is that you can create restricted Communities with external feature through REST.

After deleting these Communities i checked the Community overview through my browser and found following view:

So you mustn’t use wsadmin to restore Communities from trash, you can use this view. Never heared of it and the documentation still mentions wsadmin as the only way to restore them.

Last week i want to build a “light” Connections Installation to test some things like OAuth and Customizing. So i installed Domino 9 Beta on Ubuntu 12.04 64 Bit, DB2 9.5.7 Express and WebSphere. I deployed the homepage and the profiles databases. After this i want to install the required applications of Connections (Homepage, Search and News) and Profiles.

Installation shows no more dependencies and i started up my Connections after install. Modules are looking good, but when i want to add a status update the windows opens, but show no buttons to Save the Status. Even on homepage or people views i can’t add status updates.