DDive11 - Lotus Connections 3.0

IBM Lotus Connections 3.0: le novit della nuova versione e best practices per un sano deployment di produzione

Roberto Boccadoro
Lotus Collaboration Solutions Architect

Roberto Boccadoro

52 anni, dei quali 17 passati in Lotus/IBM, un terzo della mia vita.

Ho iniziato a lavorare con Notes 3.0, devo ancora smettere... :-)

Ovviamente nel corso degli anni ho lavorato su molti dei prodotti che Lotus ed IBM hanno rilasciato sul mercato, ed anche su qualcuno che non avete mai visto.

Al momento il mio ruolo in IBM quello di Collaboration Architect, ovvero una figura di IT Architect specializzata nel portafoglio Lotus.

Il mio compito quello di aiutare i Clienti ed i Business Partners a disegnare soluzioni che prevedano l'uso di vari prodotti Lotus.

[email protected] 335/8073444

Agenda

What's New in Lotus Connections 3

Lotus Connections Next Highlights

Best Practices - keeping your deployment happy and healthy

The wider organization uses Social Collaboration

Home pageSee what's happening across your social network

BlogsPresent your own ideas, and learn from others

CommunitiesWork with people who share common roles and expertiseFilesPost, share, and discover documents, presentations, images, and more

Micro-bloggingReach out for help your social network

ProfilesFind the people you need

WikisCreate web content together

Social AnalyticsDiscover who and what you dont know via recommendationsActivitiesOrganize your work and tap your professional network

BookmarksSave, share, and discover bookmarks

ForumsExchange ideas with, and benefit from the expertise of others

Lotus Connections 3

Recommendations to build broad, powerful, professional networks

Providing more flexibility with stand-alone Forums application

Compliance and auditing to deliver value of social software to regulated industries

Improved user experience and navigation, including persons with disabilities

Functional enhancements

Extending our reach more integration with:WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes, LotusLive, Microsoft SharePoint, Cognos

Social Analytics to Recommend Content and People

People, Community and Content recommendations

Based on user Profiles tags, social network and actions

Available in Home page, Profiles and Communities

IBM is the first to provide this capability

Value = Discover what you don't know and who you should know

Stand-alone Forums

Multiple Forums in a Community

Browse by topic, tag and search

My Forums, Public Forums, Ownership, and Following views

Question and Answer topic workflow

Forums application

Community Enhancements

Ability to create a sub-community within a Community

Easily share a File from your personal Files list with a Community

Ability to send invitations to new Community members

With 3.0.1: ability to integrate with your ECM system

With 3.0.1: IdeaBlogs

With 3.0.1: Create a more compelling community experience for visitors through video and photo sharing

Keep the File in one location and reference in several Communities

Easily manage the members of a Community

IdeaBlogs promote Idea Generation

Gather structured feedback through Idealogs from customers

Generation and filtering of the best ideas

Post ideas and gather feedback from customers in a more efficient and structured way

Allow voting and comments from customers to bring popular ideas to surface

Facilitate moving the best ideas to development of the idea via use of Activities

Idea Blogs

Add the Idea Blog feature to a community

New ideas are shown in the widget

Shows the ideas with the most votes

Graduated Idea

Owners can take a graduated Idea and start an activity for it so that people can take action on the idea

A section is created called Graduated Idea from Idea blog

The graduated idea is now an entry within the section

A link to the entry within the Idea blog is appended to the top of the entry body

Customize Community to add ECM Custom Library

Connects to ECM library (CM8 or FileNet)

Interact with ECM content from within a Community

Community Access to ECM Library

New Moderation Capabilities

Higher quality community participation through moderation

Get the benefits of community participation, while also having the confidence of being able to moderate and govern activity and content in your customer communities

Protect the community from inappropriate content

Community members and owners can participate in the moderation process

Moderation Support

Community instance moderation - Community owners moderate their own community

Global moderation - Moderator role created to review and approve content on a server level

Supported services:Blog Entries and Comments

Community Files and Comments

Forum Posts

Pre-ModerationAuthor creates content (uploaded file, blog post, etc.) and submits it for approval.

Community owner (moderator) must approve or reject the submitted content.

Post-ModerationCommunity member sees content in the Community that is inappropriate, offensive, or legally questionable. The member can flag the content, which sends a notification to the Community owner.

Community owner reviews the flagged item and can take appropriate action by quarantining the content or dismissing the flag.

Global Pre-Moderation

Community
Pre-Moderation

Includes option to receive followed content as an email digest

Central preferences for how to get notified about different types of content

Ability to follow individual content, people,Communities and tags

Email Digest and Improved Notifications

Value = Reduce redundant work!

Users are introduced to the features

Instructional videos are provided

Customized instructions on how to get started

New Getting Started Page

Improved Navigation Model

Main navigation uses an easy to use drop down menu

Left navigation will provide an easy way to filter content

Home page widgets can live under the left navigation

Value = Faster access to the information you need

Lotus Connections supported on:Apple iPhone and iPod Touch

Apple iPad

Android 2.x devices

Nokia S60 3rd and 5th edition devices

Profiles board, Communities, Files, Forums and Bookmarks are now available

Lotus Connections Mobile

Value = Increase sales by giving sales staff all the answers

HomepageLinks to new applications Communities, Files and Bookmarks

View my updates across all applications

View public updates across all applications

View news and manage watchlists

CommunitiesProvides access to your Communities

Ability to view multiple Communities views

Search and tag cloud support

Start / Edit / Delete Communities

Manage Community members

FilesProvides access to your Files and those provided by your Network

Download and view Files, including file metadata

Search, share and recommend Files

Delete and edit Files properties

BookmarkSupport for different Bookmark views

Search and tag cloud support

Add, edit and delete Bookmarks

ProfilesEasy access to contacts within your network or organization

Ability to update and view status

View your board or other Profiles boards

Include pronunciation link

Compliance and Auditability

Enable the capability to track all data changes in all Lotus Connections components

Events consumed and processed by a 3rd party tool via new SPIs provided by Lotus Connections 3

Enable the ability to track key words or phrases even when content has been deleted or updated

Value = Boost productivity while meeting regulations

Status update plugin for Lotus Notes

New Status Updates plug-in

Update your status or view updates from your Network directly in Lotus Notes

Free download from the Solutions Catalog
http://catalog.lotus.com

Value = Get help from your network!

Access Connections Files from Lotus Notes Sidebar

Drag and drop files to quickly upload

Search for files and people and download

Files Connector for Lotus Notes

Microsoft SharePoint

New widget available for Lotus Connections Communities

Access Microsoft SharePoint files

Open and add files to Microsoft SharePoint from within a Lotus Connections Community

Free download from the Solutions Catalog
http://catalog.lotus.com

Value = Add robust social capabilities to legacy Sharepoint content

Outlook Social Connector

Profile's network locally synchronized as contacts

Profile's photos and meta-data on each contact record

In-context view of social activity from Connections

IBM WebSphere Portal

New Profiles and tag cloud portlet for WebSphere Portal

Developed with WebSphere Portlet Factory

Browse and search your Network

View and make Status Updates

Activities, Blogs, Bookmarks portlets also updated for WS Portal V7

Free download from the Solutions Catalog - http://catalog.lotus.com

Value = Easily add social capabilities to portal applications

Agenda


Coming soon in Lotus Connections


Social Software Next Themes

Social EvolutionSupport IBM Vulcan with new services and deeper portfolio integrationNeed to streamline work

Need anytime, anywhere access

Need to prioritize what's important and avoid distractions

Need consistent, integrated collaboration experience

Enhanced Communities for TeamsAdd new functions to communities to meet team use cases for sharing and collaborationNeed to share and collaborate across a group of people

Need to support different
groups with different social and collaboration requirements

Business to ConsumerCreation and management of compelling customer communities Need engaging social
customer communities to increase loyalty and revenue

Need to understand what is working and gain insight from trends

Need to support openness and choice

Social Everywhere Deliver new or expanded value in the context of other applications

Social Platform Evolution
Support Vulcan with new services and deeper cross portfolio integration

Take action right from where you areIn-Context Experiences

Microblogging Enhancements

Expanded social analytics capabilities

Additional mobile device support

Integrate 3rd party content more easily via open standardsContent aggregator combines business apps with social collaboration

Post and retrieve information to/from the news feed aggregator

Extensible UI for additional 3rd party integration via OpenSocial Gadgets

ARIA

In-Context Experiences

Take action on content directly from your Activity Stream as well as your Inbox without switching contexts (ex. File Preview, Comment inline, Vote on an idea, etc)

Consistent user experiences for navigating all tools and interacting with content across the portfolio

Share and personalize content no matter where you are using the share button in the navigation

Microblogging Enhancements

Add Images to your Status UpdatesUpload files quickly and easily

Preview as a thumbnail

'Like' Status UpdatesSingle click to give positive feedback

See who else 'Liked' the entry

Search Microblog EntriesRefine in or out of network

Hashtags searchable

Expanded Social AnalyticsMicroblog Tag cloud

Top contributors on search terms

Enhanced Communities for Teams
Add new functions to communities to meet team use cases for sharing and collaboration

Calendar widgets for eventsCalendar added to CommunityDaily, Weekly, Monthly views

Overview on Community page

Support for repeating events (daily, weekly etc.)

iCal feed allows you to view in personal calendar such as Lotus Notes

Integration into Connections Activity Stream and Search

LDAP Group supportAllow LDAP groups to join Communities

Keep LDAP group in sync with Community access

Business to Consumer
Creation and management of compelling customer communities

Reports/ dashboard to monitor adoption and community vitalityComprehensive set of metrics of all Connections servicesContent in the database

Page view

Support extensibilityFlexible drill down and data slicing

Create/Modify metrics

Metrics Overview Page

Quick access to key metricsView the rest of the metrics for this theme

Drill Down

Toggle between static and dynamic mode. Dynamic mode lets you drill up and down.Right click to drill up and down

Filter by Geography

Filter metrics by geographyMetrics grouped by geography

Custom Reports

Display custom reports created through Cognos Report Studio.

Social Everywhere

Expanded deployment options with new Connections services in Lotus Live

Social extends the IBM Customer Experience Suite

TIMETOACT Group provides an administrative interface for Connections

New integration with Rational Team Concert and Connections

Find new partner solutions regularly in the Greenhouse Catalog
http://greenhouse.lotus.com/catalog

Agenda


Coming soon in Lotus Connections


Keeping your LDAP and Database data in sync

Use IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator 7.0 Fix Pack 5 to populate/synchronize the Profiles database from an LDAP directory.

TDI Solution for Profiles (TDISOL) is the code that ships with the product.

Managing user data Map the fields in the database to the fields in the LDAP directory.opt/IBM/TDI/V7.0/TDISOL/TDI/map_dbrepos_from_source.properties

opt/IBM/TDI/V7.0/TDISOL/TDI/profiles_tdi.properties files stores LDAP and how to sync_ settings

Populate the Profiles database with information from the LDAP directory

Script: collect_dns task collects DN's to be processed from the LDAP directory.

Script: populate_from_dn_file task Populate the database repository from the source LDAP directory

Synchronize LDAP directory changes with the Profiles database

Script: sync_all_dns task

Few important properties in the profiles_tdi.properties file that controls the synchronization process.

sync_updates_show_summary_only When set to true, this property shows only the records that need to be changed, but does not make the changes in the database. The changes are summarized in the files: employee.adds, employee.deletes, and employee.updates.

sync_updates_hash_field value must be a constant attribute in the LDAP directory.

Keeping your LDAP and Database data in sync

There have been a number of customer incidents involving multiple cron jobs over running each other due to poorly scheduled sync tasks (sync_all_dns)In 2.5 when this occurs it can cause large numbers of users to get deleted/inactivated.

To prevent this situation from occurring in 3.0 we added a Lock File mechanism. The Lock File prevents the running of more than one sync_all_dns task at a time.TIP: In the event that the lock file does not get cleared correctly, run the following scripts:clearLock.bat(windows)

clearLock.sh (linux/AIX)

User LifeCycle (new in LC 3.0)

Purpose: inactivate a user who is left the system

In 3.0 sync_all_dns task inactivates the users rather than deleting them from the Profiles DB and pushes the 'inactivation' information from Profiles to the other components.

In 2.5, Profiles deleted such users while other components were unaware that the users had left the system.

Managing Search - Overview

The Basics:Index generated by retrieving information based on a schedule (default indexing interval is 15 minutes)

WebSphere Application Server scheduling service is used for creating and updating the Search index. (Additional scheduled tasks include nightly optimization task and the social analytics index building task)

Location of the index: /search/indexWebSphere Application Server Integrated Solutions Console > Environment > WebSphere variables > SEARCH_INDEX_DIR

Administered using the wsadmin command environment.

Important: when upgrading from 2.5 to 3.0 the index is re-created you cannot reuse the index from a prior release.

Managing Search - Overview

Search Deployment Considerations:Important: Each node running the search application must have the search index stored locally on the node's file system. No Network Shares!This is due to limitations of using Lucene indexes on shared file systems. This architectural change introduces a slight performance gain as indexes are not read over a share and allows for faster recovery in the event of index corruption on any node. Indexes are portable between nodes

Multiple nodes = Index per each node. How to initially configure:

Start one Search node in the cluster and wait for the index to be built.

Stop all the nodes that are running Search.ear.

Copy the built index directory to the index directory on each node running the Search application and Start all the nodes.

Instructions: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Creating_an_initial_or_new_Search_index_lc3

How are the index kept in sync across nodes? During update indexing, the seedlist crawling is limited to a single node. Crawled content is indexed and written into cache tables in the Homepage database. Once a crawl has been successfully completed a JMS message is broadcasted and each search node writes the content from the cache table to its local index.

Exploring Lotus Connections Install Directory

Lotus Connections installed directoryThe Lotus Connections product files installed in a location called , for e.g., opt/IBM/LotusConnections

User may choose to install the data directory that is used for storing local and shared information inside

/data

opt/IBM/LotusConnections/data/local

opt/IBM/LotusConnections/data/shared

The product customization files are stored in opt/IBM/LotusConnections/data/shared/customization directory

Refer this URL for Customizing the user interface and know how this directory is being used for customization's: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/Customizing_the_user_interface_lc3

The UPDI for Lotus Connections directory

/updateInstaller

Server Performance - Basics

Performance Tuning Guide for Lotus Connections 3.0:http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/dx/IBM_Lotus_Connections_3.0_Performance_Tuning_Guide

Deployment considerations:Connections supports a vast number of different deployment topologies.

Important question to consider is: 32-bit vs 64-bit and what servers to group together. With 32-bit - place applications in their own JVMs so there's enough memory available to each.

With 64-bit - reasonable to group more applications in a single JVM.

The LDAP and databases should be separate machines from the application server.

With Performance...don't overlook the basics:Disk and Network - Slow or heavily fragmented disk or slow network card is going to limit performance.

CPU - metric to monitor

Memory - enterprise-scale deployments recommend at least 16 GB of memory

Server Performance WebSphere Application Server

Connections is a WebSphere application:WAS application health considerations apply:

Database connection pools and tuning

Initial WebSphere JDBC pool size is only 10 connections maximum.

Should be increased for all installations (see tuning guide for recommendations for each component)

Periodically review Database connection pools to avoid resource constraints.

Can be done with IBM Tivoli Performance Monitor

Generally, any time a DB connection pool has been exhausted, it probably needs to be increased.

WebContainer Thread Pools

Default pool size of 50 may be too small for larger deployments (particularly if there's no reverse proxy driving more requests to the application server)

Increase to 100 to allow more simultaneous requests against the application server

Server Performance - WebSphere Application Server

HeapsizesFor 32-bit JVMs, a min/max of 512MB/1408MB is usually a good choice (and remember not to put too many applications in one JVM)

For 64-bit JVMs, much larger heaps can be used. 6-8GB is reasonable.You can run with 1 JVM reasonably with 64bit.

Key Advantage of 64-bit is its vastly larger address space

Remember to make sure all the processes fit into physical memory (and a Java process is bigger than just its heap)

Server Performance Database server

Connections is a database application:Deployment tip: If possible, database should be deployed on 64-bit hardware, with each database deployed in its own database instance. Make sure you have plenty of memory on the DB server!

Connections takes advantage of the self-configuring and self-maintaining features of DB2V9.7. Leave them on so DB2 can optimize itself based on actual workload.

We recommend a frequent review of the DB2 general error log db2diag.log looking for general and critical warnings.

Maintenance Tip: Do regular database maintenance if DB type is DB2.

Runstats - should be run regularly to ensure queries are being executed optimally

Reorg - when significant amount of data is added to the db.

Rebind - after structural changes (such as a DB2 fixpack)

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DDive11 - Lotus Connections 3.0

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Transcript of DDive11 - Lotus Connections 3.0