You can customize the standard email messages that are
sent by the applications in IBM® Connections,
including the auto-generated notifications that are generated by the
News application.
Before you begin
Important: Before making
any customizations, first back up your original notifications folder.
In addition, ensure that any customized files are backed up before
performing a product upgrade or applying a cumulative refresh or fix
pack, as you might need to merge your changes again manually after
making updates.
About this task
The content of individual notifications is defined in templates
that are processed by the FreeMarker engine. You can customize the
content of notifications by modifying the existing template files
or by replacing the files with custom templates that you create yourself.
You can also modify the notification properties files to add custom
strings to the templates and modify the images used in the notifications.
Procedure
Customize the content of an email message by completing
the following steps.
- To customize an existing template file:
- Locate the FreeMarker template that corresponds to the
notification that you want to customize. For more information about
the notification types used in IBM Connections,
see Configuring notifications.
Notifications
are stored in the following location:
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/
where
app_server_root is
the WebSphere® Application
Server installation directory and
dm_profile_root is
the Deployment Manager profile directory, typically dmgr01.
You
can find folders for each application in this location and a shared
resources folder. Look for the FreeMarker template for the notification
that you want to customize in the relevant application folder. When
you find the template that you want to modify, open the .ftl file
in a text editor.
- Make your customizations to the template as needed.
For information about editing the templates, refer to the FreeMarker
documentation on the following web page:
- Save your changes and then close the file.
- Synchronize all the nodes using the Integrated Solutions
Console.
- Stop and restart the News application.
- To edit the text strings used in the notification:
- Using a text editor, open the notification_language_code.properties files
in one of the following directories and make your changes:
- Application-specific strings:
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/application_name/resources/nls
- Shared strings:
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/resources/nls
Where
language_code is the locale of the
language. For example,
notification_fr.properties.
Tip: To see where each string that you are editing is used,
look at the
.ftl template files in the same directory
and check the statements with the following format:
u.resource("key")
where
key
is
the key of a translated string in the resource bundle
notification_language_code.properties files.
Note
that the notification framework will look in the application-specific
resources folder before moving to the shared strings in the shared
resources folder.
- Save your changes and then close the files.
- Synchronize all the nodes using the Integrated Solutions
Console.
- Stop and restart the News application.
- To customize the images used in the notification:
- Locate the images in one of the following directories:
- Application-specific images:
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/notifications/application_name/resources/images
- Shared images:
app_server_root/profiles/dm_profile_root/config/cells/cell_name/LotusConnections-config/news/notifications/resources/images
Note that the application-specific images are loaded before images
in the shared location. If an image is loaded from the application-specific
folder, the shared location is not checked for that image.
- Replace any image that you want to customize with your
own version using the same file name.
The images are sent
as MIME attachments to each email digest, so ensure that the image
size is small.
- Synchronize all the nodes using the Integrated Solutions
Console.
- Stop and restart the News application.