Deploying the IBM Connections Plug-in for Microsoft SharePoint

After you install the plug-in, you activate the IBM® Connections features to make them available from Microsoft™ SharePoint.

About this task

To enable the IBM Connections plug-in, deploy the features to the Microsoft SharePoint server farm. You can complete the deployment from the Central Administration site or from the Management Shell. See the Microsoft documentation for further details.

Procedure

  1. Follow the instructions that are provided by Microsoft to deploy the following solutions:
    • ConnectionsPluginCore.wsp - Required for business card integration, the profile search and tag cloud web parts, and the IBM Connections SharePoint widget.
    • ConnectionsPluginCore_LCID.Tivoli Workload Scheduler for PeopleSoft where LCID is a Microsoft locale ID. Required for any languages that are in use in the server farm. Refer to the Microsoft documentation for the list of SharePoint supported languages and their LCID. If deploying solutions using Management Shell, refer to the Microsoft documentation for deploying language pack solutions. Deploy the ConnectionsPluginCore.wsp solution before you deploy any language pack solutions. The IBM Connections plug-in supports only the languages that are supported by IBM Connections 3.0.
    • ConnectionsProfileSearch.wsp - Optional, provides the profile search web part.
    • - ConnectionsTagCloud.wsp - Optional, provides the tag cloud web part.
  2. Activate the IBM Connections features.
    The IBM Connections Tag Cloud and Search IBM Connections Profiles features are installed when their solutions are deployed. However, they must be activated before the web parts display in the Web Part Gallery. These features are scoped to the Site Collection level, so for a particular site collection, you can activate the web parts from Site Settings > Site Collection Administration > Site Collection Features. The features can also be activated using the Management Shell using the Enable-SPFeature command. For more information about the Management Shell command, refer to the Microsoft documentation.
  3. To enable the IBM Connections Profiles business card on your SharePoint site, make the following changes to your master page:
    • Near the beginning of the page, register a tag for the IBM Connections profile user control:
      <%@ Register TagPrefix="Connections" tagname="ProfileScript" src="~/_controltemplates/ConnectionsProfileScript.ascx" %>
    • At the end of the master page body, include the IBM Connections profile user control:
      <Connections:ProfileScript ID="ConnProfileScript" runat="server"/>
    For more information about customizing master pages, refer to the Microsoft documentation.