Is Verse on prem the end of Connections Mail?

A technote has come to light – marking the end of life for Connections Mail

https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21993196

The content states

November 2016 is the end of support for the following versions of ICM V 1.0 (for Connections 4.0), and version 1.3 (for Connections 4.5).
End of support for ICM 1.6 (for connections 5.0) will be one year from the publication of this TechNote, November 17, 2017.

We intend continue to support the latest version of the plug in, 1.7 with Connections 5.5. At this time there are no plans to release IBM Connections mail plug in with Connections 6.0.

So what will this mean for Connections Mail users? For Domino mail customers, the likely hood is that you will update to Verse On Premises (VOP) and consume mail / Connections content in the new Verse on prem UI .. for Exchange users I am not sure .. if any one has the answers please let us know.

I do use Connections mail and I actually enjoy having an overview of my inbox and calander inside connections. As we move to a VOP I can see me using the integration between my mail and Connections a lot, I use the notes sidebar plugins and the Connections desktop and office connectors – so its a natural progression for me and others I work with.

If it wasn’t for another community member posting the technote in the Connections skype chat I wouldn’t have known about this. So I am sharing it as I am sure there are others who do not know about this either. I do still have customers running Connections 4.5 who are now not supported for Connections mail.

As Connections Mail 1.7 for Connections 5.5 is continuing to be supported, it looks like any existing users are ok for now, but there will be no support going forward. Not sure how this will affect users or how many people are using Connections Mail out there in the wild, but I do have a few customers using it. Would love to know your thoughts.

 

IBM Connections 5.5 and Docs 2.0 announced

At last what we have been waiting for the latest versions of IBM Connections and IBM Docs are available this Friday the 18th of December.

 

There are over 100 new features included nested folders, there is a new cleaner look continuing the trend that we have seen over the last two releases.

 

 

  • Organize your documents, presentations and more into your own nested folder hierarchy in Personal and Community Files
  • Brand new file viewer experience which allows you to find the content that you need faster and review it quickly without having to download
  • Build powerful team sites specific for your team needs (e.g. HR, Sales, Marketing, etc) with new configuration capabilities such as:

 

  • New community layouts
  • Responsive apps so you can just drag-n-drop between columns in one motion
  • Rename apps based on your audience
  • A brand new Rich Content app which you can use for announcements or embedding content from the web
  • and much more.. !

 

  • Smart type-ahead search to find what you need instantly
  • Enhancements to the rich text editor such as permanent pen, sort table data, and more
  • Real-time alerts on your desktop (for HTML5 browsers) to notify you when content needs your attention

 

 

I am really looking forward to getting the latest releases downloaded and tested over the Christmas break .. great work from the product management team …

Read the full post on Luis blog here

FEB / Connections Surveys – custom LDAP attributes

Thanks to Christopher Dawes in the IBM Forms support team a long running issue I have seen with FEB (Forms Experience Builder) / Connections surveys is now resolved!!

Once of my long standing very awesome customers was seeing a problem with Connections surveys. They do not use a standard LDAP attribute for their displayname – the cn is the employee number and the uid is a short name which is not always easy to differentiate between users. These are the 2 attributes that FEB expect to use as the user display name. Not always easy to tell who abc12345 is .. or sbell123 so I opened a PMR to get to the bottom of how to change this to a custom LDAP attribute – in this case we use fullName – which displays my user as Sharon E Bellamy.

After a bit of backwards and forwards, many logs and tracing and a bit of DB hacking to prove the theory we now have a solution.

So here is how to resolve it.

Firstly you need your custom LDAP attribute – fullName
You will the repository Id of your LDAP – this is basically the label you have given the LDAP in the configuration. In this case it was novell as the LDAP is Novell E Directory

LDAPID

 

 

 

 

 

 

but in another example here you can see an Active Directory example (ADInternal)

 

 

LDAPID2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 1:

Add a new WebSphere Entity Type – wsadmin

open a command prompt to the deployment manager/bin directory

run wsadmin (you do not need to set the lang type to jython)

enter the command to set the new entity type – were name = your LDAP attribute name and repositoryIds is your LDAP identifier

 

[blockquote]

$AdminTask addIfMgrPropertyToEntityTypes { -name fullName -dataType String -isMultiValued false -entityTypeNames PersonAccount -repositoryIds Novell}

[/blockquote]

 

 

 

 

 

This registers the attribute in the WIM config.

 

 

 

Step2:

Add the entity type into WebSphere

open the WebSphere admin console / ISC

browse to Security > Global Security > Configure federated repositories

Click on the link for your repository identifier (novell in my case)

LDAPID3

 

 

 

Once in the repository config, click on the Federated repositories property names to LDAP attribute mappings

 

LDAPIDs4

 

Enter a the new attribute for our custom LDAP entry (fullName)

 

LDAPIDs5

 

Where Name = a meaningful name for the new attribute

 

Property name = the LDAP attribute name

 

Entity types = PersonAccount

 

Apply and save

 

Save a lot

 

then restart the deployment manager.

 

Step 3:

Edit the Builder_config.properties on the node where FEB is installed (in my case the primary connections node)

the default directory where this is kept is

Windows – C:\IBM\Forms\extentions

Linux – /opt/IBM/Forms/extentions

Open the property file in your favourite text editor

near the top of the file ensure the

ibm.was.MemberManager.userProps.displayName property is not commented out and add your new LDAP attribute

in my case

 

[blockquote]

ibm.was.MemberManager.userProps.displayName = fullName

[/blockquote]

 

 

 

 

 

Save and close the file

 

and restart everything

 

Now when you create a survey or fill one in your new attribute it used.

Existing surveys are updated with the owner / creators name when they log in. The freedom (FEB) DB is updated when the user logs on and the display name is updated.

 

There you have it – took a while as there was a little bit of jiggery pokery with the wsadmin command and the PersonAccount attribute but it works 🙂

Hope this helps anyone else seeing the same problem

External users in connections, multiple LDAPs when using domino root

Originally posted over on the Cube Soft Blog

As mentioned in our presentation at EngageUG – We came across a problem when adding multiple LDAP repositories in WebSphere.

The scenario was a Domino customer – who use the root domino domain – had a requirement for a second LDAP repository in connections to manage external users. They are a global company and via directory assistance grab the users that need access to connections but have no control over the records themselves. The plan was to have a 2nd domino domain for external users that the admins could manage independently of the main directory / domain.

We hit a problem as when using the domino root – it does all sorts of *fun* things inside WebSphere to overwrite any 2nd LDAP or additional base realm entries. After much testing with domino and ad as a 2nd LDAP, all the known work arounds didn’t resolve the issue, we opened a PMR.

As it turns out the answer was pretty simple:

Set your domino root LDAP us as you would do normal – but, when you get to the point of adding the unique base entry to the realm add a name i.e o=dominoRoot (it doesn’t matter what this is as long as its o= something)

Select the tick the box to use a different distinguished name – leave the 2nd box blank
*EDIT* – you may need to add double quotes to provide a blank – i.e “” we will remove this in the next step

domRoot

Save the config.

Next we need to edit the wimconfig to remove the offending entry that causes WebSphere to get confused.

The wimconfig can be found in <WAS_HOME>/profiles/Dmgr01/config/cells/<CELL_NAME>/wim/config

Find the entry relating to the new domino root entry .. and remove the duplicate base entry :

<wimconfig.xml>--------------------------------------------
<config:baseEntries name=""/>
<config:baseEntries name="o=dominoldap" nameInRepository=""/>
</wimconfig.xml>--------------------------------------------

remove the line
<config:baseEntries name=""/>

save and close the file and restart the deployment manager and connections nodes.

Once restarted the Domino root users and groups are still accessible inside WAS / Connections and it is now possible to add a second LDAP base entry correctly.

In the case of this particular customer we have added an External users AD, but another domino domain directory or any other supported LDAP should also work perfectly 🙂

Do you monitor your Connections environment?

After being to a few user groups lately and seeing all the great monitoring tools for Domino I am interested in what people use to monitor connections.

The WebSphere piece of connections can put a lot of people off and I am wondering if something was available would you use it?

  • If you do monitor, what do you use
  • If something was available with a *dashboard* would you use it?
  • What features would you like in a monitoring app
  • Would you be interested in something bundled in Nagios etc

I have created a quick survey which should only take you 2 mins to fill in, if you can spare the time to fill it in I would be most grateful

You can use the survey below or head to the link here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NZBDNW6

 

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

Fun and games with Commuity wigets

Last night we managed to close a PMR that had been open for a few weeks on a strange issue with Community Widgets.

After remapping the connections admin user everything worked exactly as expected except for 2 tiny issues – Adding the blogs and surveys widgets inside a community thew a nasty error.

communityError

 

Thanks to Justin Cornell in IBM support we managed to get to the bottom of the issue by remapping the widgets admin user even though it was mapped correctly.

Jump over to the Cube Soft Blog –  Fun and games with Community Widgets for the full diagnosis and resolution.

Fun and Games – O yes 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

Help shape connections search

If you are interested in helping IBM shape the search application inside Connections there is a survey that you can participate in.

This is a short survey to better understand attitudes and behaviours around search and how users – well – use it 🙂

You can find the search survey here

Fill it in and you will make a Connections product manager very happy 🙂

Odd issue with Connections Mail

I have been looking to implement Connections mail for a while for one of my customers, after finally sorting out some SSO issues we had been seeing I was ready to deploy into their DEV/TEST environment. No problem I thought – Connections mail is a very simple install a couple of config files and a quick wsadmin command to get the help to work.

Once I had deployed I was seeing the strangest issues –

Contact your system administrator:
Missing element with class=”os-site-mail-notify”

After spending a few hours trying to work out what the issue was, sanity checking myself in the Connections skype chat and much google-ing – I threw in the towel and opened a PMR. I did my usual of explaining the situation, listing OS and level, Connections versions and fixes etc and sending in a screen shot, Log files and the Connections mail config file – a couple of hours later I had a response.

It appears that something has changed between V4 and V4.5 of connections – I had customisations brought over from V4 and copied the header.jsp as it looked on first glance that there was no changes between 4 & 4.5

In Version 4.5 the span for the mail notify icons is :
–%><span class=”os-site-mail-notify”></span><%–

Previously it was:
–%><span id=”os-site-mail-notify”></span><%–

Changing this span from id to class resolved my issue.

So the moral of the story is even if you think nothing has changed – it most likely has

Big thanks to Jonathan P. Dormady Staff Software Engineer in Connections Support for finding me a solution so quickly

 

Speaking at Connect 2014 what an honor

It is an honor and a privilege to have been chosen with my friend and community peer Christoph Stoettner to speak at this years Connect / Lotusphere conference.

This will be the 4th Connect / Lotusphere I have attended but the first I have spoken a full session at – in previous years I have helped run a BOF and have spoken at speedgeeking.

We will be speaking in the Best Practices track, sharing our admin and scripting tips and tricks to help make a Connections Admin’s day a little easier 🙂

Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 12.58.57The full article can be found here on the IBM social insights blog

See you in Orlando 🙂