Hcl 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.

Connections 7 has a new Administration Console to access Communities Template administration and Mobile Administration.

The Administration Console can be reached on https://cnx-hostname/cnxadmin/. The / at the end is important, because the ingress rule just forwards /cnxadmin/(.*).

On Firefox you get this view:

With Chrome (Chromium, Edge) the left menu is missing. There is a display: inline-flex for some elements in index.css of the Administration Console.

So how can we inject a repaired css file into the container?

ConfigMap

One quick and dirty way is to use a configMap with the adjusted stylesheet. So I did the following:

The last days I analyzed an issue, that file uploads to HCL Connections via IBM HTTPServer stopped working on a fresh installed 6.5CR1.

Today I configured a Connections 7 and tried with it. I think that the official documentation is old in some important parts for the upload configuration.

First of all my IBM HTTPServer 8.5.5.18 is not 32-bit like the documentation tells us:

Since IBM Connections 6.0CR4 we can use a new newsletter format which needs still (now with HCL Connections 7) be activated separately in LotusConnections-config/notification-config.xml.

Today some users asked how they can add other users to their private communities (visible in Community catalog) without manually adding them. As we investigated the question I had a look at the old notification format.

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:

Some weeks ago I wrote about an workaround to prevent TDI from deleting the touchpoint status in HCL Connections .

During some research on TDI I found Mapping fields manually in the HCL Connections documentations. This document describes how to add additional fields to the TDI synchronisation. On point 11 I found something new for me. You can add additional fields and then add the content with an Javascript function for example.

Today I activated Elasticsearch Metrics and Typeahead Search on my demo HCL Connections cluster .

To my surprise the indices weren’t created and I got errors on the wsadmin.sh commands.

SearchService.createESQuickResultsIndex()

I checked the Elasticsearch pods which showed a running state, but the logs showed following messages:

HCL included some additional apps with HCL Connections 6.5CR1. One of them is Touchpoint, which can be used to present users the “Terms and Conditions” (or Privacy and Guidelines) of the environment and some help creating their profile, network and become member of their first communities.

Touchpoint writes some profile extension entries in the PEOPLEDB database in the table PROFILE_EXTENSIONS, most important:

Time is running very fast and I completely forgot to update the blog for a long time.

What happened since DNUG Day 2020 ?

This week I attended the DNUG Connections Day 2020 in Munich . First of all I need to thank the organization team which did a really good job (Thanks Andreas , Martti and Lara ). During the short breaks we had great conversations with parts of the HCL Developer team and other attendees.

Update

I completely forgot to mention Jörg Rafflenbeul ! He was responsible for beer steins, a great glass of quits jar, photos, videos and a ton more. Sorry Joerg and thank you!