Urs-o-Log

For many Connections administration tasks you need to specify which Connections configuration file you want to use by running a WSADMIN command like e.g. execfile(“activitiesAdmin.py”).

If you have more than one Connections node this command will ask you on which node you want the command to run and you need to answer with 1 or 2 etc.

If you want to use these commands in a script, you need to specifiy a variable before running that command to suppress the manual interaction. So you can use

batchMode=1; execfile(“activitiesAdmin.py”)

which automatically runs the command on the first node.

If you want to use a specific node, you can use the following command:

serviceNodeNameActivities=connectionsNode02; execfile(“activitiesAdmin.py”)

For other config files you need to change “Activities” to the corresponding application name.

If you change the host name of your server or, as in my case, install as non-root user under Linux and therefore need to use non-standard ports like “8080” and “4430” in the URL for installing and then later switch that back to the standard port “80” and “443”, you might see the problem that your Rich Content Widget in Connections 5.5 Communities no longer works.

The reason for that could be, that in the database there is a reference to the wrong hostname / port number. Check the database table HOMEPAGE.OH2P_CLIENTCFG for an entry “conn-rte”. If you find one and it has the reference to the wrong hostname or port, just delete the entry and restart your Connections servers. This is described in that Knowledge Base article.

The entry should be recreated automatically with the correct values and the Rich Content widget should work again.

By the way: There might be another reason why the Rich Content Widget in Connections 5.5 is no longer working. If you have configured Connections that way that all applications need authentication, then make sure that the READER role for the Rich Text Editor WAS application is set to “Everyone” and not to “All authenticated users” (which is then the case for the other applications). Otherwise the widget will not work.

Update: As there were questions what exactly the “Rich Content App” is: It is a new application which you can add in a Community to display rich text content:

If you configure the Sharepoint Widget for IBM Connections as it is described in the Infocenter, then Communities which are migrated from IBM Connections 4.5 to 5.5 no longer show the Sharepoint Widget if one was configured in 4.5.

The reason is that in the documentation the widget ID has been renamed from “SharePointFiles” to “SharePoint Documents”. From my point of view, they just wrongly switched the text for  “defID” and “description”.

So the documentation says:

However, the correct definition should be:

In the 4.5 environment of my customer, the widget ID was named like that and I am quite sure we had copied and pasted that from the 4.5 documentation in the past.  So I guess that is just a typo in the documentation. I have told the responsible person for the documentation to check and, if necessary, correct it.

IBM Connections 5.5  Cumulative Refresh 1 (CR1) has just been released. You can find the fix list here and the download here. Make sure you check the upgrade guide  and download also the required database upgrade scripts. In case you have installed Cognos as well, you need to download and apply the updated Cognos Wizard.

If you would like to create a custom theme fpr IBM COnnections 5.5 Communities according to the description in the Wiki, you need to keep the following in mind:

• The reference to the default theme files in the documentation is wrong. The correct jar file to use is “com.ibm.social.hikari.theme_*.jar” instead of “com.ibm.oneui3.styles_*.jar” otherwise you will not get the correct files for the Hikari theme but the old Gen4 theme files (IBM will correct the documentation here)
• You also need to make sure that you delete the TEMP and WSTEMP folders of ALL Connections application servers (path e.g. “/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/(ws)temp/”) and restart also ALL your application servers. It is not sufficient to just delete the temp files of the InfraStructure cluster and restart that one (although both Common.ear and Communitie.ear resides on that cluster).
• Double check that you have no typo in the path name of the CSS files in your communities-config.xml. They must match exactly the names you use in the themes folder.
• You can use a “custom.css” file within your custom theme folder to specifiy your theme changes so that you do not need to modify the default theme css files.

If you miss one of these steps you might end up with a community theme which looks like the old Gen4 theme from IBM Connections 5.0

Be also aware that, if you have customized the Connections theme itself, you need to make these changes also for every custom Community theme.

In a Connections environment, where you have changed the permissions so that only authenticated users can use Connections (by setting all “reader” roles in all Websphere applications to “All Authenticated in Application’s Realm”), you are no longer able to use the Rich Content app within a Community.

If you add the app to the Community you see the message “The page could not be created due to an error”.

To solve the issue, set the role “reader” for the WAS application “RichTextEditor” back to “Everyone”. This application does, by default, not allow anonymous access so that this is not a problem.

After restarting the application, your “Rich Text” app should work as normal.

This is a required update for IBM Connections 5.5, so please download and install this iFix from FixCentral. Make sure you have installed the other IBM Connections 5.5 iFixes as well (especially the prerequisite fixes  LO87330 and LO87487).

Update 2016-02-17:

I just tried to install it on my test environment and got some issues afterwards. As long as I have not found out the root cause (not sure if it is the hotfix installation or something else) I recommend to install it only on a test environment where you can go back easily to the state before).

Update 2016-02-18:

It seems to be an issue with command line install. This did not work for me all the time. Installing via the Wizard succeeded. Have a PMR opened for that.