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.

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.

I use markdown since years to create my articles or most of documentation stuff.

It’s really cool to edit the text files on all of my devices, synchronize them fast through various internet services and create HTML, PDF or even DOCX files out of this sources.

Until last week i converted the markdown sources with pandoc and pasted the html code to the different pages, where i need them. So i copy and paste it to IBM Connections, Evernote or WordPress . On WordPress i use a plugin now to render the markdown textes, but for IBM Connections i didn’t found a way.

Julius Schwarzweller wrote a blog post with a collection of links to CR3 for IBM Connections 5.0 this week. A official update document with new features is missing.

I installed it today (without CCM) and the first new feature i found is “sharing folders” with Communities:

As shown in the screenshot only public folders can be added to community files widget.

From files application you can still share a folder with people, groups and communities (but then the folder will be public available too):

Social Connections 8 ended some hours ago and first I want to thank the organization team ! It was a great job and an awesome conference you built here. The speaker gift was an absolute great idea!

It was the first time Social Connections headed to the United States and the location at IBM Boston was a well made decision. I visited the Boston area the first time and enjoyed all the days.

I already arrived on Sunday evening and had the pleasure to stay with Victor and his family until we headed to Boston. Thanks for the hospitality!

Last week i was at ConnectED 2015 in Orlando. I enjoyed the event very much, mainly because i met great old and new friends. The Lotus community is one of the best i’ve ever met, or i ever was part of.

After coming home i found out that i have a flu and the headache and need of sleep is not age dependent. So the visits to kimonos and dolphin bar are a little bit shorter than last year, but i enjoyed them nevertheless.

I did a session during ConnectED 2015, see the last version of slides here:

Today i read in Anderl Artners Blog , that he provides some Assembly Lines for TDI/SDI , which can help you with SPNEGO and mailintegration. Thanks for that!

Last week i searched a way to send all Connections users an information on important updates, which should be configurable and uses cookies to hide it for a specific time.

First i had a look at the Greenhouse Announcement Widget which is used within Greenhouse .

Quite nice, but i had problems with IE 9 users and the popup appears on each page you open within Connections. So i tried something other.

After some searching i found a script of Ollie Phillips which is originally used to inform users about Cookie usage on the site. Ollie published the cookiesDirective.js under the MIT License. When you find the announcement slider useful, please buy him a beer .

This week starts in the beautiful town Prague with Social Connections VI. I met great people and first of all i want to thank the organisation team for this great event.

At the end we made the traditional image with all attendees.

I enjoyed two very delicious dinners and had great discussions around IBM ICS, met old and new friends. After years of tweets, forum entries and virtual talks i finally met Martin in person and had an entertaining evening with him and Sjaak .

As preparation for Social Connections VI in Prague next week i redesigned the Administration Scripts for IBM Websphere .

Some highlights:

• all scripts are moved to a subfolder with DMGR/bin (folder name: ibmcnx)

• tested in multinode environments

• added some classes everybody can use for his own scripts

• adding policies to libraries (personal and communities) are using search now

New scripts:

• documentation of all jvm settings of each application server

• create a file with all documentation in one step

• create cluster members for additional nodes

Sharon created a document with the content of all of our presentations and collected several tipps all around connections and community scripts. She will share this next time. We started to share parts of this document and more documentations (installation, usage) for scripts and IBM Connections on:

IBM released a tech document on friday with title: Search fails with the error CLFRW0060E: Input-output exception .

This document solves one of my problems i had in a demo environment since two weeks. I traced the environment, checked j2ee roles, reinstalled CR3 and 4, redeployed search and activities, but i always got an error, when the search wants to access the activities seed list.

So what happened? I want to show the /search/serverStatus page in a course and for this i want to remove all warnings and errors. When you don’t set SEARCH_SEEDLIST_TIMEOUT, you get a warning, that the variable is not set.

Adding a custom field to IBM Connections Profiles is great documented in “https://www.slideshare.net/palmke/show301-make-your-ibm-connections-deployment-your-own-customize-it-30628456[SHOW301: Make Your IBM® Connections Deployment Your Own: Customize It!]” the Connect 2014 session of Wannes Rams and Klaus Bild . Thanks to them for this great collection of customizing tipps.

In my case the bundle name is “stoeps” and the custom field i want to add is “twitterId”.

lotusconnections-config.xml

<resources>
    <!-- Custom strings for field labels -->
    <widgetBundle name="local.stoeps.profiles.strings.uiLabels" prefix="stoeps"/>
</resources>

local.stoeps.profiles.strings.uilabels.properties

# extension property field labels
label.stoeps.twitterId=Twitter Id:

profiles-types.xml

<property>
   <!-- Custom field for Twitter ID -->
   <ref>twitterId</ref>
   <updatability>readwrite</updatability>
   <hidden>false</hidden>
</property>

profiles-config.xml

Checkout profiles-config.xml and change following points:

You can log login errors within IBM Http Server.

One way would be to get use SetEnvIf, but then you can’t get the querystring of the error page. When you type a wrong password the URL changes from https://connectionshost/application/login/ to https://connectionshost/application/login/?error=true.

SetEnvIf Request_URI "/login$" log

This set the environment variable to log, but when you read the Apache documentation you find:

The resource requested on the HTTP request line — generally the portion of the URL following the scheme and host portion without the query string. See the RewriteCond directive of mod_rewrite for extra information on how to match your query string