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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.
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.
Setting up marketing campaigns
Use these tools and features to setup marketing campaigns for your website.
Personalization
Portal Personalization provides automatic customization of website content for individual users and user groups.
Personalization programming reference
HCL Digital Experience provides the programming model, processes, and APIs for the Personalization rules and resource engines.
Programming model
Personalization builds on the same programming model used by WebSphere Application Server. Two components of that model are Java Server Pages (JSP) and business logic (JavaBeans and enterprise beans). JSP files enable you to effectively separate HTML coding (presentation) from business logic. You isolate your business logic in beans that the Web page author embeds in the JSP.

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.
  - 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.
    - Website building blocks
      Unless you are familiar with the HCL Digital Experience and HCL Web Content Manager website model, review the building blocks. Building blocks are the different parts that make up the website framework, such as pages, navigation, themes, content, content libraries, and more.
    - Creating reusable assets
      Use reusable assets to store or generate content that is used in more than one place in your website.
    - Building the website
      Building a website includes creating libraries, pages, and web content. You also create links and navigation to your content, and assign access to different types of users, such as editors and viewers.
    - Authoring tools
      There are multiple ways to create and manage content including using the site toolbar, inline editing, and the authoring portlet.
    - Preparing for content authors
      Before content authors can create content you must prepare your site to be ready for content creation, including preparing the site toolbar, enabling inline editing, and creating templates.
    - Developing and managing content
      Use these tools and processes to develop and manage your website.
    - Delivering web content
      The type of delivery method you use to deliver web content to your viewers depend on the type of content that is being delivered, and the type of viewers your website is intended for.
    - Vanity URLs
      You can associate vanity URLs with portal pages and labels. Vanity URLs are short URLs that people can easily remember. They are shorter than full HCL Portal URLs. They are sometimes also called marketing URLs. You can publish vanity URLs for marketing campaigns through different channels, such as email or print. This way, you can use vanity URLs to direct customers to a specific portal page or content item. Interested site visitors who want to view your campaign can then remember or copy the short vanity URL and type it into the browser address field.
    - Social rendering
      HCL Digital Experience page editors can use social rendering to feature social data that is hosted on a remote HCL Connections server in the context of portal pages.
    - Setting up marketing campaigns
      Use these tools and features to setup marketing campaigns for your website.
      - Personalization
        Portal Personalization provides automatic customization of website content for individual users and user groups.
        How a site is personalized
        Use this topic to understand how to define a personalized list of new articles for a website, such as a section of an intranet site for targeted employee bulletins or where the content of the site is tailored to the particular user.
        Personalization terms
        The concepts and principles for working with Portal Personalization require an understanding of terminology.
        The Personalization interface
        The Portal Personalization user interface consists of three portlets: the Personalization Navigator, Personalization Editor, and the Personalized List.
        Publishing personalization rules overview
        HCL Portal Personalization sends published rules across HTTP to a servlet which resides on each personalization server. This servlet can receive publishing data or initiate new publishing jobs. When a user begins a publishing job from the personalization authoring environment, the local servlet is provided with the set of information necessary to complete the job. The local servlet contacts the destination endpoint servlet (which could be the same servlet) and sends its data to it. The destination servlet reports success or failure.
        The Web Content resource collection
        The Web Content resource collection is installed and configured out of the box. This predefined collection allows you to write rules that select lists of content from HCL Web Content Manager. Rules specify which Web content to show in a Portal Personalization component in Web Content Manager.
        The Portal User resource collection
        Portal Personalization comes with a Portal User resource collection. This collection uses public APIs provided by HCL Digital Experience to access user information.
        LikeMinds Recommendations
        Personalization contains a dynamic recommendation system based on LikeMinds. LikeMinds is software that is used with your e-commerce applications. LikeMinds analyzes user interactions that occur on your Web site and generates real time predictions and recommendations to your Web site users.
        Feedback and analytics
        Personalization provides a complete logging framework for collecting data on how visitors are using your Web site. If Feedback is enabled, data is automatically collected about each Personalization rule that is fired. In addition, development tools enable websites to collect a variety of data related to visitors' actions and behavior. By default this data is logged to a standard database schema for later analysis and reporting. The framework is also extensible, allowing websites to customize and supplement the way data is collected and stored to more fully meet their needs.
        Developing a personalized portlet
        This exercise demonstrates how to use Personalization features of HCL Portal and Rational Application Developer to build your first personalized portlet. Your final result is a working portlet that uses Personalization rules and content spots to display personal news based on user attributes (or profiles).
        Personalization programming reference
        HCL Digital Experience provides the programming model, processes, and APIs for the Personalization rules and resource engines.
        Preparing your personalized application
        Before deploying applications that take advantage of the features of Portal Personalization, certain features must be configured in order to work properly. The Feedback and LikeMinds components of Personalization both communicate with their databases using Java™ data sources. Before using either of these components, you must create resource references to the data sources in your project.
        Programming model
        Personalization builds on the same programming model used by WebSphere Application Server. Two components of that model are Java Server Pages (JSP) and business logic (JavaBeans and enterprise beans). JSP files enable you to effectively separate HTML coding (presentation) from business logic. You isolate your business logic in beans that the Web page author embeds in the JSP.
        User and content models
        The first step in developing a Personalization solution is to analyze your business conditions and events to determine the users and content to be targeted. The business users and administrators are primarily responsible for this task.
        How the rules engine works
        The rules engine processes and delivers the results of a rule execution to a content spot contained in a web page. The content spot is marked by a content spot bean, which is placed in either a JSP file or a servlet. The JSP file or servlet is then linked to the web page.
        Workload management
        Only one Portal Personalization engine can be installed on an application server. Consequently, there is one Personalization engine for each servlet engine. Personalization supports application server clustering, because each Personalization instance in the cluster shares the same IBM Java Content Repository. Therefore, each Personalization instance accesses the same customer data stores.
        Using the Personalization APIs
        Personalization provides open APIs that enable the Personalization run-time environment and Rational Application Developer to access user and content data in customer data stores.
        Generic query framework
        The generic query framework enables resource collection developers to convert a property-based query object into a language specific executable query string. It contains query component classes, and builder and callback interfaces.
        Request Context
        This is the interface used to access various attributes for rules. For HTTP contexts, it provides access to the HttpRequest and HttpSession attributes. For non-HTTP contexts, it provides the same interface to a surrogate for the request and session.
        Sample Personalization resources XML file
        Use the sample file ExportFromServlet.xml as a reference for coding other Personalization actions.
        Content spot exits
        Content spot exits provide the ability to alter the default flow of processing of content spots, making it possible in the runtime environment to override the rule to process, the current user, and the results of rule processing. Instances of the same exit class are instantiated for all content spots. The exit class interface name is public interface RuleExit.
        Resource cache
        Personalization uses the WebSphere Application Server Dynamic Cache service to cache the results of select rules and to cache the rules themselves in a DistributedMap. When publishing, importing or saving rules, the cache is flushed automatically to ensure that the site is current.
        Programmatically starting rules
        All types of rules can be accessed programmatically within a Java application. For example, a profiler can be used to determine the behavior that an application must exhibit depending on the current user, or an action can return content to your application for further processing before the content is displayed. Rules are mapped to content spots, and because a content spot is an implementation of a JavaBeans, it can be programmatically declared and implemented.
        Rule Exception Handling in the run-time environment
        The default method of error or exception handling within the Personalization run-time environment is for the engine to print out a trace error to the application server's stdout log. Using an exception handling utility, it is possible to specify the type of output (error message or stacktrace), the output log file to use (stdout or stderr), and whether the exception should be rethrown to the JSP. The additional exception handling capabilities can be set on a per-request basis or globally.
        Personalization APIs
      - Social Media Publisher
        The Social Media Publisher for HCL Web Content Manager is an extension to HCL Web Content Manager that allows businesses to promote their web content on social networks, and provide some basic statistics about the promoted content.
    - HCL Web Content Manager Multilingual Solution
      The HCL Web Content Manager Multilingual Solution is a set of tools that are used to manage translated versions of localized and regionalized websites.
    - Syndicated Feed Portlet
      The Syndicated Feed Portlet for HCL Digital Experience offers enhanced feed subscription and presentation capabilities.
  - 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.

Programming model | HCL Digital Experience

Personalization builds on the same programming model used by WebSphere Application Server. Two components of that model are Java Server Pages (JSP) and business logic (JavaBeans and enterprise beans). JSP files enable you to effectively separate HTML coding (presentation) from business logic. You isolate your business logic in beans that the Web page author embeds in the JSP.

The term developer could refer to Web page authors or programmers. The developer does not need programming skills to author JSPs that access databases and reusable Java components. The author only needs to know the type of content that the bean, servlet, or other Java component adds to the page. The programmers create the reusable Java components and provide the Web page authors with the component names and properties. The database administrators provide the Web page programmers with the database access and table information.

run-time model

The model expands three Web team roles:

The business users

The business users understand the business goals that the Web site or Web application must achieve. They understand the business conditions and business rules that must be factored into the Personalization solution. For example, the business users know the characteristics by which to categorize users for effective implementation of the business rules.
The developer

The developer understands Web site development and can use Rational Application Developer (or similar tools) to create and publish Web pages and sites. The developer works with the business user to determine where personalized content should appear and creates content spots of the appropriate type at the proper locations on the Web pages.
The administrator

This team member is the Web content expert and/or server administrator. The administrator knows what content already exists, where it is stored, the people who provide the content, how often the content is updated and other details. This person understands how to categorize content and helps the business users organize and target content for categories of users.