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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.
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.
Search
You use Portal Search to search for text that is displayed in websites that are created by HCL Web Content Manager.
Portal Search
Use Portal Search to facilitate indexing content sources and searching for information. You can administer search services, search collections, and search scopes, as well as enhance the search experience of your portal site with the portal search portlets.
Administering Portal Search
You can administer and configure many details for Portal Search.
Searching and crawling Portal and other sites
You can configure your local Portal site and crawl remote Portal sites so that they are searchable by users. Run crawlers against other external websites to make them searchable by local portal 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.
    - Configuration Wizard
      Use the Configuration Wizard to set up stand-alone servers and new deployments, create clusters, migrate and update to new versions, and add new capabilities to existing deployments.
    - Setting up a stand-alone server
      Use the Configuration Wizard to set up a stand-alone server. A stand-alone server is useful for different environments, such as a content authoring environment, test environment, and more.
    - Setting up a cluster
      Use the Configuration Wizard to set up either a dynamic or static horizontal cluster.
    - Tune your environment
      HCL Digital Experience is not tuned for a production environment by default. Complete the steps in the Performance Tuning Guide to optimize performance.
    - Web servers
      HCL Digital Experience uses the internal HTTP transport within IBM WebSphere Application Server to handle requests. However, because WebSphere Application Server also supports the use of an external web server, you can access HCL Portal from your web server. You can use a local web server on the same server as HCL Portal or you can use a remote web server on a different server. A remote web server is typical for a production environment or other high-traffic configuration and is also typically placed in DMZ outside a firewall to protect portal ports.
    - HCL Portal
      First, finish your HCL Digital Experience deployment with the Configuration Wizard. Then, you can configure your environment further. For example, you can tune your servers to improve performance. You can change the default context root.
    - HCL Web Content Manager
      Set up a content server by installing HCL Web Content Manager in various deployments to provide robust and flexible environments for web content development and delivery. After you install the content server, more configuration steps must be completed according to the role that the server plays in your web content environment.
    - Syndication
      Use syndication to replicate web content library data from one server to another server. Syndication is based on a syndicator and subscriber relationship. The syndicator has the current data. The subscriber received the current data from the syndicator.
    - Database Management Systems
      Configure the connection between HCL Digital Experience and your database management system. The Database Transfer configuration option in the Configuration Wizard assigns users and permissions, creates databases, obtains support for database collation, and transfers your database.
    - User registry
      User information is stored in your user registry. You can enable LDAP referrals, configure HCL Digital Experience to use dynamic groups, update your user registry, or delete your user registry configurations.
    - Search
      You use Portal Search to search for text that is displayed in websites that are created by HCL Web Content Manager.
      - Searching pages
        By selecting a search type in Manage Pages, you can quickly locate and work with pages, labels, or URLs.
      - Searching for tagged content
        Users can search the tag space by using the browser search box.
      - Planning and preparing for Portal Search
        Learn about some planning considerations and first steps that you need to apply before working with Portal Search.
      - Indexing web content
        To search for web content, your content must first be indexed by the HCL Portal search engine. When the content is indexed, you can run searches by using the search center or by using a search component. If you search for documents in the WebSphere Portal search center, be aware that you see search results for published documents only. Unpublished pending changes in a project are not included in the results.
      - Configuring Web Content Manager search options
        You can edit the following search options to manage how the search service works with Web Content Manager search forms.
      - Configuring Search Center to search for web content
        You can use the Search Center to search for web content by adding a web content search collection to the Search Center.
      - Language and region support in Portal Search
        Depending on your portal environment and your users, you might want to make multilingual content available and searchable in your portal.
      - Crawling web content with search seedlists
        Portal Search supports the use of seedlists to make crawling websites and their metadata more efficient and to provide content owners fine-grained control over how content and metadata are crawled. You can configure the portal to use seedlist support when crawling content generated with HCL Web Content Manager.
      - Searching your local portal
        View information on setting up your local portal for your users to search.
      - Configuring your portal site for search by internet search engines
        You can enable your portal site for search by using search services such as Google or Yahoo! Search on your portal site by external search services works for public portal pages only, that is, for pages that users can access without a user ID and password.
      - Enabling anonymous users to search public pages of your portal
        You can enable anonymous users (sometimes also called unauthenticated users) to search public pages of your portal by using the portal Search Center portlet. Search by anonymous users works only on public pages of your portal, as the users are not logged in to your portal.
      - Configuring your custom portal themes to include the search box
        Enable your portal users to use the Portal Search box and Search portlet in your own custom theme.
      - Redirecting search requests from a custom search form to the Search Center
        If you plan to develop a custom search form, you might want to redirect search requests issued by the search form to the Search Center.
      - Remote search service
        You can configure the search portlets for local operation, or you can configure them for remote search service. Depending on your configuration, remote search service might have performance benefits by offloading and balancing system load.
      - Configuring search in a cluster
        HCL Digital Experience provides two distinct search capabilities. You can use both types of search capabilities in a clustered environment.
      - Configuring search in a portal farm
        HCL Digital Experience provides two distinct search capabilities. You can use both types of search capabilities in a portal farm environment.
      - Configuring search collections for a virtual portal
        Configuring JCR search collections for a virtual portal might require additional administration, depending on how you set up the virtual portal.
      - Portal Search
        Use Portal Search to facilitate indexing content sources and searching for information. You can administer search services, search collections, and search scopes, as well as enhance the search experience of your portal site with the portal search portlets.
        Portlets for working with Search
        Get an overview of the portal search portlets.
        Administering Portal Search
        You can administer and configure many details for Portal Search.
        Managing search services
        Get an overview of how you manage the portal search services. This task includes creating a new search service or editing an existing search service.
        Search service configuration parameters
        Learn about the portal search service parameters and possible values.
        Configuring the default location for search collections
        You can modify the default directory location under which search collections are created on a per search service basis. View some related information.
        Configuring the Search Center portlet
        Get an overview of how you configure the Search Center.
        Replacing the search administrator user ID
        If you changed the portal administrator user ID or password, you need to update the search administrator user ID to match the same values.
        Customizing the Search Center
        Customize the Search Center by adding, removing and configuring additional portlets, such as External Search Results or Recommended Links. The external search results portlet displays search results from third-party external search engines such as Yahoo and Google. Using the recommended links portlet, display search results from a collection of predefined links with predefined keywords. You can also configure the All Sources scope or replace it with a customized scope.
        Using the WebSphere Integrated Solutions Console to administer Portal Search
        You can administer Portal Search by using the WebSphere Integrated Solutions Console and using resource providers in XML format.
        Setting up search collections
        View information on setting up search collections for search by users. This also includes creating content sources and managing search scopes and custom links.
        Searching and crawling Portal and other sites
        You can configure your local Portal site and crawl remote Portal sites so that they are searchable by users. Run crawlers against other external websites to make them searchable by local portal users.
        Resetting the default search collection
        Under certain circumstances, you might want to change the configuration of the portal site search collection. In this case, you must re-create the collection, as search collections cannot be modified.
        Crawling a remote portal site
        Configure Portal Search to crawl and index a remote, public portal site.
        Crawling an external site using a seedlist provider
        The seedlist crawler is a special HTTP crawler that can be used to crawl external sites which publish their content using the seedlist format. The seedlist format is an ATOM/XML-based format specifically for publishing application content, including all its metadata. The format supports publishing only updated content between crawling sessions for more effective crawling. You can configure the seedlist crawler with general parameters, filters and schedulers, then run the crawler.
        Hints and tips for using Portal Search
        View some useful tips for using Portal Search.
        The portal site search collection fails
        Creating the portal site search collection can fail due to a file path length restriction.
        Portal Search trace and log files
        Portal Search provides logging and tracing so that you can get additional information for resolving possible problems.
    - Document Conversion Services
      Document Conversion Services are used when you work with HCL Web Content Manager authoring, previewing, and search.
    - Setting up a remote spell checker
      Using a local spell checker is not supported. You cannot run spell checker on 64-bit systems. Instead, you must install and configure spell checker on a remote application server and access that server from the local HCL Portal server.
    - HCL Connections
      HCL Connections portlets give the HCL Digital Experience users access to more collaboration and social networking features such as activities, blogs, and bookmarks.
    - Reference: Configuration properties
      For your convenience, the properties files that are used to configure HCL Digital Experience are included in the product documentation. Information that is specified in the properties files is used to configure databases, LDAP integration, security, including external security managers, and more.
  - 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.
  - 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.

Searching and crawling Portal and other sites | HCL Digital Experience

You can configure your local Portal site and crawl remote Portal sites so that they are searchable by users. Run crawlers against other external websites to make them searchable by local portal users.

Users of your Portal can search across various types of sites. In addition to searching the local Portal site, you can crawl remote Portal sites, and external websites, to make search results from those sites available to your local Portal users. Examples of search scenarios include:

Users of your Portal search your own local Portal site. This can include public and secure pages of your Portal.
Users of your Portal search the Web Content Manager collection provided with the Portal. This includes all Web Content Manager sites and libraries,
Users of your Portal site search other Portal sites. This works only for public pages of the other Portals.
Users of your Portal search external websites such as yahoo.com or google.com or cnn.com. When you run a crawler against external websites, you can collect and display external search results next to results from your local Portal site.
External users search your Portal site. This works only for public pages of your Portal.