Hcl Connections

I haven’t touched the Connections scripts for a long time, but I recently made some minor updates to fix compatibility issues with newer versions and added small scripts to speed up configuration. I also got the documentation script running from the menu.

I showed, in several slides and sessions, how you can use the search-admin role in the search application of HCL Connections for troubleshooting and reviewing some key configurations.

In several environments, my user or other administrative users have this role, just to access the link to /search/serverStatus for example.

Last week I played around with the HCL Connections documentation to backup Elasticsearch in the article Backup Elasticsearch Indices in Component Pack .

In the end I found that I couldn’t get the snapshot restored and that I have to run a command outside of my Kubernetes cluster to get a snapshot on a daily basis. That’s not what I want.

During a migration from Cognos Metrics to Elasticsearch Metrics, I had some issues with the index. So I wanted to create a backup of the already migrated data and start over from scratch.

The official documentation has an article on the topic: Backing up and restoring data for Elasticsearch-based components , but I had to slightly adjust the commands to get a successful snapshot.

In the last few years, I have had issues with application servers using a large amount of CPU and even hanging application servers running the Tiny Spellchecking service. It ended with disabled spellchecking in the Tiny Editors’ config.js.

The annual conference of DNUG took place in Constance from 22nd to 23rd of June 2022.

I attended the HCL Connections Roadmap session given by Rene Schimmer and David Strachan. They showed the updates for version 8 and beyond.

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.

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

HCL Support published a collection of links to MustGather informations for Connections and addons. That’s the perfect starting point to start troubleshooting and collecting logs for your support cases.

• Collecting Data: Repository of MustGather for Connections

I wrote about font loading from external CDN in the post Hiding The Create Community Button 2nd last year and hoped this is finally fixed for all Connections applications. A good summary on the reasons to not allow external font loading is Blocking Web Fonts for Speed and Privacy .

So I checked with a Connections 7 deployment with the latest CFix (CFix.70.2112) deployed, if this is still an issue with Connections.

In former Connections’ versions we found external fonts loaded in Orient Me (/social), Communities Catalog (/communities) and the Admin panel (/cnxadmin/).

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.

The newsletter in version 2 format has one big disadvantage, we or our users lost the easy links to the topic, author profile or application.