Presentation on Connections administration given at ISBG in Larvik, Norway May 2014

1. Become a Connections
Administrator
Gabriella Davis, The Turtle Partnership

2. !
Gab Davis - Technical Director
The Turtle Partnership
gabriella@turtlepartnership.com ▪Administrator, Problem Solver,
Stubborn Fixer of Things
▪Working with IBM technologies
and all the things surrounding and
integrating with those
▪Based in London, about half the
time
2

3. CONNECTIONS IN ALL ITS GUISES

4. 4
• A Connections Administrator
is knowledgeable about
many different products and
tools that have a wider
application than just IBM
Connections
• A Connections developer can
use development tools from
CSS to OpenSocial gadgets to
Java and more, all have a
much wider application than
just IBM Connections

5. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNT
ABOUT PLANNING

6. Fight For The Resources You Need
6

7. Are You Sure About That WebSphere
Architecture?
7

8. It’s All About The
People
Locations
Teams
You’re only as good
as your LDAP
Meaningful context is
everything - who ARE
these people?

9. I wish I had connections to plan installing connections….
Drag everyone into a room…..

10. INSTALLING

11. DOWNLOADS &
DOWNLOADS &
DOWNLOADS
11

12. Verify Everything Before
Starting

14. KNOWING WHERE ALL THE DATA IS

15. CONFIG
LOCAL DATA
SHARED DATA
FILE ATTACHMENTS
DATABASES

16. DATABASES

17. FILE ATTACHMENTS

18. SHARED DATA
Customisation Strings
Profile Types
Language Translations
File Attachments
Custom JSPs

19. LOCAL DATA
Forums
Media
Communities
Status
Profiles
BlogsActivities
W
ikis
Search Index

20. CONFIG
Deployment Manager
/dmgr/config …
Cluster1_server1
Cluster1_server2
InfraCluster_server1
InfraCluster_server2
dmgr

21. DANGER!
!
..deleting a Community is irreversible &
can be done by any Community Owner

22. LDAP

23. Connections
Directory
LDAP 1
LDAP
Failover
LDAP 2
DNS &
LDAP

24. 2 4
LDAP
DIRECTORY TDI SERVER
TDI SCRIPTS /
ASSEMBLYLINE
PEOPLEDB
DATABASE
CONNECTIONS
PROFILES
CREATING PROFILES
31 5

25. Population Wizard
Simple: Manual
1 LDAP Source > Profile
XML Files From TDISOL
1 LDAP Source > Profile
Some data manipulation
Assemblyline
Advanced: Realtime
Multiple Data Sources
Full data manipulation

26. IBM HTTP SERVER

27. IBM HTTP Server

28. HTTPD.CONF
In HTTPServerbin
Can be modified in WebSphere
PLUGIN-CFG.XML
Generated by WebSphere
Mappings for every application
Distributed to HTTPServer

29. DANGER!
!
The httpd.conf file can be easily broken as
it’s not validated on save
!
A faulty httpd.conf will prevent IHS from starting

30. MORE STUFF…

31. Searching
Files & Folder Metadata Document
Types
Tagging
✤ People /
Unstructured
✤ Process /
Structured
Finding Things

32. Databases
Dep Mgr
Filenet
ConnectionsIntegrationAdding CCM

33. Cognos
BI
Cognos
Transformer
Cognos &
Metrics DB
Cognos &
Metrics J2EE
Apps
Connections
Reporting

34. Forms Experience Builder
Polls & Surveys
Installs on
WebSphere Server(s)
Requires
DB2
Installs on
every server
in the chosen
cluster

35. ADMINISTRATION

36. Websphere Administration
▪ Application security - the rights users have to applications
• Not granular “one size fits all”
• New roles that change behaviour aren’t something you can add
!
• Wsadmin
• command line administration tool
• also used to make changes to application configuration settings

37. ApplicationSecurity

38. WSAdmin – sending commands
▪ Start in the BIN directory of the deployment manager
– C:IBMWebSphereAppServerprofilesDmgr01bin
!
▪ Call wsadmin by typing
wsadmin(.sh) –lang jython –username [name] –password [password]
▪ Choose which application you want to work with
execfile(“profilesAdmin.py”)
▪ Any changes you make here will be pushed out to all the nodes
– Wsadmin commands are case sensitive regardless of your platform

39. JAASAUTHENTICATION
!
– Global Security – JAAS – J2C authentication data

40. DatabaseReorg
Look for reorg.sql scripts in
the connections.sql
directory of the installer

41. backup & restore from
Dmgr profile “bin”
directory
backupconfig d:backupsdmgr040114.zip -nostop

42. SystemOut.log
LOG_ROOT variable
= log file location
Each WAS server
has its own logs
Location and retention
configurable by server

43. Do’s & do nots
▪ Backup your configuration using backupconfig before making changes to the configuration
– Never manually edit an XML configuration file, always use wsadmin which verifies the
XML structure as it’s checked back in
– Schedule the database reorg maintenance scripts to run regularly,
– Set up specific credentials for developers to use to access the Connections data, don’t re-
use administration credentials
– Ensure you have a test / staging server to test customisations, enhancements and
developments on
– Never skip post installation steps , or any steps, follow the documentation
!
– Never let your developer have ISC access or wsadmin access to a production
environment!

44. HOWTO FIND ME
Twitter, blogs, Instagram, Facebook and more
gabriella@turtlepartnership.com
GabriellaDavis (skype)
http://turtleblog.info
gabturtle on twitter and elsewhere