Home
HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
HCL Digital Experience 8.5
Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
Administering
Use the administration tools that are provided with the portal to do various day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: using the administration portlets or the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration. While the XML configuration interface is suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.
Browser behavior and scenarios
Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.
Configuring history expiration limits
You can configure how far back the HCL Portal tracks the history of the navigational state of pages. This allows you to control the balance between the performance of your portal and the retrievability of previously visited pages for users.

HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy Content]
- HCL Digital Experience 9.0
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 9.0 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
- HCL Digital Experience 8.5
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
  - Overview
    HCL Digital Experience (formerly IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager) empowers you to create, manage, and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to virtually all audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications, and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile. and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).
  - Roadmaps to deploy your system
    Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
  - Roadmaps to create your website
    Review the roadmaps to understand how to create your website.
  - Online Help
    This Online Help is made available in the HCL Digital Experience Help Center for quick references on how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Digital Experience.
  - Installing
    HCL Digital Experience provides flexible deployment options that range from proof-of-concept where you can examine and test functionality to a highly available and scalable production environment. Review the planning information to learn more about hardware and software requirements, high availability, scalability, supported topologies, and much more. Select your operating system and then select the installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
  - Configuring
    Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
  - Backup and restore
    Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
  - Migrating
    Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
  - Integrating
    Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
  - Administering
    Use the administration tools that are provided with the portal to do various day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: using the administration portlets or the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration. While the XML configuration interface is suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.
    - Portal administration tools
      Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
    - Web content administration tools
      HCL Web Content Manager includes tasks and tools to help maintain your content management system. For example, use the member fixer task to resolve renamed or deleted users and user groups. Use the workflow checker and updater tools to modify workflow security settings, reschedule pending actions, and add workflow to items. HCL Web Content Manager also includes tools to assist with library and item management, and item and version history management.
    - Starting and stopping servers
      Various installation and configuration tasks require you to start and stop IBM WebSphere Application Server and the HCL Digital Experience application servers, deployment managers, and node agents.
    - Users and groups
      HCL Digital Experience offers you centralized administration of users and user groups, allowing you to better define users and manage user access rights. Users can register and manage their own account information, or an administrator can provision and manage users. Group memberships can be used to give the required permissions to access an object or perform a request.
    - Managing portlets, portlet applications, and iWidgets
      You must do some preparatory tasks before you make your portlets, portlet applications, or iWidgets available to your users by putting them on portal pages. This preparatory task includes installing, deploying, and configuring portlets, applications, and iWidgets.
    - Administering managed pages
      You can run advanced administration tasks for managed pages, such as generating URLs for projects or working with projects by using scripts, or working with vanity URLs.
    - Manage pages portlets
      Use Manage Pages to create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages and external web pages and labels. Available tasks depend on which item is selected. Each page can contain multiple pages. All pages on which you have the User or greater role are displayed in a navigation menu. You must expand pages to access nested pages. The options that you see are dependent upon your access level.
    - Managing theme capabilities
      You can administer the theme module framework. This includes deploying resources that can be cached, configuring capability filters, and disabling the automatic prerequisite loading feature.
    - Managing community pages
      Community associations associate a portal page with a community in HCL Connections.
    - Managing your cluster
      After installing and configuring your clustered environment, you will need to manage the different parts of your cluster to ensure a highly available production environment.
    - Managing your site
      Earlier versions of HCL Digital Experience provided the Resource Manager portlet for performing site management. With Version 8.0 of HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager, this site management functionality has been replaced by the new functionality for managing pages.
    - Tagging and rating
      Get an overview of the administrative tasks related to tagging and rating.
    - Using WebDAV with HCL Portal
      HCL Digital Experience provides a Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) implementation that individual services can use by plugging into. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows you to collaborate on editing and managing files on remote Web servers.
    - Virtual portals
      View information on how you can scope your HCL Portal to have multiple virtual portals.
    - Language support
      To reach as many users as possible, HCL Digital Experience supports different languages for different locations. For instance, a large, international corporation might address users in different countries or regions through multilingual websites. In this context the portal can concurrently serve portal views to large numbers of users, each in the user's preferred language.
    - WSRP services
      HCL Digital Experience supports the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. By using this standard, portals can provide portlets, applications, and content as WSRP services. Other portals can then integrate the WSRP services as remote portlets for their users.
    - Browser behavior and scenarios
      Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.
      - Back button behavior
        Learn how the behavior of the web browser Back button can affect portal navigation.
      - Back button limitations
        The following restrictions apply to backward navigability of portal pages.
      - Configuring history expiration limits
        You can configure how far back the HCL Portal tracks the history of the navigational state of pages. This allows you to control the balance between the performance of your portal and the retrievability of previously visited pages for users.
        History manager for pages
        The history manager allows you to control for how many visited pages navigational state you want to tracked. In other words it controls the maximum number of pages whose state is contained in the portal URLs. The visited pages are tracked within the navigational state in a LRU algorithm based way.
        History expiration limit for render parameters
        You can configure the portal so that it discards the render parameters for pages that the user has not visited recently within the same session. The purpose of this setting is to limit the URL length. This might be of benefit for the performance of your portal. The portal discards the navigational state of the portlet application of standard API portlets on pages that are too far back in the history.
  - Securing
    Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
  - Monitoring
    HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
  - Setting up a website
    Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
  - Staging to production
    During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
  - Developing
    This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
  - Troubleshooting
    This section helps you resolve problems, use diagnostic tools and tracing to capture HCL Digital Experience system errors.
  - Reference
    View information that can help you use the Digital Experience Help Center including directory conventions, terms of use, trademarks, a glossary, and more.
  - Glossary
    This glossary includes terms and definitions for HCL Digital Experience.
  - Content Template Catalog 4.4
    The Content Template (CTC) is a set of templates that accelerate the process of building a website.

Configuring history expiration limits | HCL Digital Experience

You can configure how far back the HCL Portal tracks the history of the navigational state of pages. This allows you to control the balance between the performance of your portal and the retrievability of previously visited pages for users.

About this task

The further back your portal tracks the history of portal pages, the further back your users can go in their browsing history of pages that they visited before. However, this also increases the URL length of your portal pages, as the navigational history is stored in the page URL. Therefore limiting the page history might be of benefit for the performance of your portal.

HCL Portal provides two different approaches for controlling the page history in the navigational state:

The history manager allows you to control the number of previously visited pages for which the portal tracks the navigational state.
The history expiration limit for swapped render parameters