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.
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.
Developing and managing content
Use these tools and processes to develop and manage your website.
Projects
Projects are used to change a set of items on your site and ensure that they are published together at the same time. A new project has a default workflow that allows content to be reviewed and approved before it is published.
Best practices for projects
Use these tips and guidelines to develop and publish projects more effectively.

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.
      - Previewing as another user
        You can preview changes to your website without logging out and logging on again as another user. This preview capability is used to quickly verify that users with different access levels see only content that they are authorized to see. You can preview changes as a specific user or as an unauthenticated user.
      - Projects
        Projects are used to change a set of items on your site and ensure that they are published together at the same time. A new project has a default workflow that allows content to be reviewed and approved before it is published.
        Project review state
        If you select at least one approver for a project, the project must be submitted for review before it can be published.
        Project States
        When you use a project, the project progresses through a series of states.
        Ways to publish a project
        Publishing a project refreshes the live website with your changes.
        Project Publishing
        An outline of the process of publishing a project.
        Drafts and projects
        You can create, update, and approve pages in a draft state, without affecting the published site. When you work with pages, you can edit pages as drafts, manage drafts with approval workflow, and then syndicate to publish changes.
        Scope of edits
        When you edit pages in a project, you use workflow for approving changes before you publish them until they are approved. If you edit pages without selecting a project, your changes are published immediately.
        Project Validation
        An outline of the validation process.
        Projects and syndication
        Projects are included in syndication, the method that is used by HCL Web Content Manager to replicate data from a web content library on a syndicator server to a web content library on a subscriber server. Although projects are syndicated with other items in a library that is being syndicated, you cannot use the subscriber copy of the project to update or publish your project. Work with projects on the syndicator server only.
        Projects and custom workflow actions
        Each workflow stage contains default actions, but you can also create custom workflow actions by creating a custom workflow plug-in.
        Best practices for projects
        Use these tips and guidelines to develop and publish projects more effectively.
      - Workflow and change management
        You can manage changes to web content items either by creating drafts, by using workflows, or adding items to projects.
      - HCL Web Content Integrator
        The HCL Web Content Integrator is a solution for integrating externally managed web content with HCL Portal. By using standard content syndication feed technologies based on RSS 2.0, the Web Content Integrator provides a loosely coupled mechanism for transferring published content and metadata to the portal after they are approved in the source system. When the content and metadata are transferred to the portal, it is possible to use the built-in content management features of Web Content Manager to secure, personalize, and display the content to users.
      - WebDAV
        With WebDAV for HCL Digital Experience, you can use standard operating system tools to create, modify, and delete web content rather than the standard authoring portlet.
      - Blogs
        Use blogs and blog libraries to provide news and commentary on a variety of subjects pertinent to your intranet and extranet sites. Blogs and blog libraries typically combine text with graphics and links to other blogs and websites. Entries that you create and post are arranged in reverse-chronological order, with the newest entry displayed first. Readers can post comments about your entries, fostering discussions and online networking. You can manage your own blog entries and comment on other blog entries. You can also incorporate tagging and rating as you would with other WebSphere Portal content.
      - Wikis
        Use wikis to share community content on a variety of subjects pertinent to your intranet and extranet sites. Wikis typically combine text with graphics and links to other wikis and websites. You can monitor and manage your own wiki articles.
      - Installed portlets
        Learn about the portlets that are provided with HCL Digital Experience.
      - Renditions
        Renditions are different versions of an image component or element. Renditions can be thumbnails or smaller versions of an image formatted for mobile devices.
      - Video start and end points
        File components or elements that have a video file that is stored in an HTML5 video format, which includes MP4, webM, or ogg, are stored in Brightcove and have a Brightcove ID.
    - 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.
    - 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.

Best practices for projects | HCL Digital Experience

Use these tips and guidelines to develop and publish projects more effectively.

Use separate projects for different parts of the site structure

Coordinating projects is an important part of ensuring that changes to your website are published as expected. For example, you might have two authors working on the same part of the site structure but with each author editing pages in a different project. Because the authors are working in different projects, they cannot see draft changes that the other author makes until the projects are published. If both authors insert a new page between the same two published pages, the resulting page order might not be what was intended.

To prevent these situations, avoid editing the same part of the site structure with multiple projects at the same time. Instead, when multiple projects are used at the same time, ensure that you use each project for a different part of the site structure.

Coordinate changes to a project across users

When multiple users are working in the same project, one user might not be aware of the changes that another user makes. If you change the state of the project, such as deleting it or publishing it, any outstanding updates from other users are not saved. To ensure that you do not inadvertently discard changes from other users, coordinate with users of the project before the state of the project is changed.

Coordinate unique names across projects

When multiple projects are used for the same site, similar unique names might be introduced in different projects. For example, you might have two authors working on the same site but with each author editing in a different project. Because the authors are working in different projects, they cannot see draft unique names that the other author uses until the projects are published. If both authors insert a similar unique name, the result might not be what was intended.

To prevent these situations, avoid introducing new unique names with multiple projects at the same time. Instead, when using multiple projects at the same time, ensure that you use different unique names within each project.