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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Administering
Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
Portal administration tools
Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
The XML configuration interface
Use the XML configuration interface (XML Access) for exchanging portal configurations.
Working with the XML configuration interface
You can use the XML configuration interface to export and import HCL Digital Experience configurations. This way you can configure selected features or areas of your portal. You can also transfer a complete configuration from one portal to another.
Using the XML configuration command line client
You access the XML configuration interface using a command line tool. This command line client is a separate program that connects to the server. Connecting to a remote server makes it possible to configure the portal remotely. You use the command line syntax of the XML configuration interface.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and 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 HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
  - Roadmap: Syndication
    Syndication is the tool that is used to replicate data from a web content library on one server to a web content library on another server. The relationship between a syndicator and a subscriber can be either a one-way or two-way relationship.
  - Portal administration tools
    Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
    - Portal administration portlets
      Administration portlets are supplied with HCL Digital Experience. Use them to perform administration tasks and actions on portal resources, give other users limited access rights on selected resources, and deploy custom portlets, themes, or skins.
    - The XML configuration interface
      Use the XML configuration interface (XML Access) for exchanging portal configurations.
      - About the XML configuration interface
        The XML configuration interface provides a batch processing interface for portal configuration updates. It allows you to export an entire portal configuration or parts of a configuration, for example specific pages, to an XML file. You can then re-create the exported configuration from such a file on another portal.
      - Changes to the XML configuration interface
        Learn about the changes that were made to the XML configuration interface from earlier versions to current versions of HCL Digital Experience. This information can be useful to you if you migrate your HCL Portal from one version to a later version.
      - Working with the XML configuration interface
        You can use the XML configuration interface to export and import HCL Digital Experience configurations. This way you can configure selected features or areas of your portal. You can also transfer a complete configuration from one portal to another.
        Using administrative portlets for XML configuration
        XML configuration through administrative portlets allows you to export and import configurations. You can export a page or an entire page hierarchy by clicking the Export icon in the Manage pages administration portlet. You can also import an XML configuration file by using the Import XML portlet.
        Using the XML configuration command line client
        You access the XML configuration interface using a command line tool. This command line client is a separate program that connects to the server. Connecting to a remote server makes it possible to configure the portal remotely. You use the command line syntax of the XML configuration interface.
        Command line syntax of the XML configuration interface
        The command line syntax for working with the XML configuration interface can vary, depending on your portal installation environment and configuration.
        Transferring portal configuration data by using the XML configuration interface
        When you use the XML configuration interface to transfer HCL Portal configuration data, you export or import an XML script file. In most cases, you can use the result file from an XML export for an XML import. Sometimes you can use the export result file directly, sometimes you must modify it.
        Creating and modifying resources
        In addition to copying and restoring configurations of existing portal resources, you can use the XML configuration interface to install new resources in the portal. You can also use the XML configuration interface as an alternative to the portal administrative user interface for running some administration tasks.
        Activating and deactivating portlets, portlet applications, and web applications
        You can change the states of portlets, portlet applications, and web applications between active and inactive by using the portal XML configuration interface.
        Scheduling the delayed cleanup of portal pages
        You can use the example XML script Task.xml to schedule the cleanup of pages that have been marked for deletion.
        Registering predeployed portlets
        You can manually predeploy portlet application WAR files using the WebSphere Integrated Solutions Console. You can later register and configure the predeployed portlet applications into HCL Digital Experience, together with other J2EE resources and artifacts, by using the XML configuration interface.
        Removing users and groups
        Depending on circumstances, you might want to remove users or groups from your HCL Digital Experience that are no longer used or required. You can use the XML configuration interface (XML Access) to list such users and groups. You can also remove only some selected users and groups, and keep others for further use.
        Preparing the deletion of orphaned resources
        You can use the XML configuration interface to delete orphaned data from your HCL Digital Experience.
        Generating a complete XML Access export of a Portal configuration
        To help troubleshooting an HCL Portal issue, you might be asked by HCL Software Support to generate or collect a full or complete export of your Portal configuration. The complete export can be generated by using the XML Configuration Interface, commonly known as XMLAccess.
        Using XML Access to export and import Digital Asset Management assets
        Using XML Access with HCL DX CF19 and higher, to manage staging scenarios, administrators can import, export, and control Digital Asset Management access control data.
      - XML configuration reference
        Learn more about XML input structure, XML tags for portal resources, attributes for special purposes such as locale data, object IDs, and more. Also find information about action attributes that determine the type of processing that the XML configuration reference applies to the portal resource. There are syntax restrictions that you need to consider as well as information about how to determine the object IDs for portal resources.
    - Portal Scripting Interface
      You can use the Portal Scripting Interface to configure your portal by running scripts from a command line.
  - 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. 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.
  - 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 Web sites. In this context the portal can concurrently serve portal views to large numbers of users, each in the user's preferred language.
  - WSRP services
    By using the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. HCL Digital Experience can provide portlets, applications, and content as WSRP services.
  - Browser behavior and scenarios
    Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.
- 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.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Using the XML configuration command line client

You access the XML configuration interface using a command line tool. This command line client is a separate program that connects to the server. Connecting to a remote server makes it possible to configure the portal remotely. You use the command line syntax of the XML configuration interface.

About this task

The remote connection can be either an HTTP connection, which is not secure, or a secure HTTPS connection. Apply care and use the appropriate type of connection that is required for your environment. Use an HTTP connection to connect to the XML configuration interface only from inside a protected intranet where you can be sure that the HTTP connection is not compromised. In all other networks use a secure HTTPS connection to connect to the XML configuration interface. For details about how to use an HTTPS connection refer to XML Syntax for using a secure connection with SSL.

You invoke the command line client by using the following shell scripts in the directory wp_profile_root/PortalServer/bin:

UNIX™Linux™: ./xmlaccess.sh
IBM® i: xmlaccess.sh
Windows™: xmlaccess.bat
z/OS®: ./xmlaccess.sh

You can also use the XML configuration interface remotely from a machine that does not have portal installed. In this case copy the required files to the remote machine and configure the portal from there. All you need is a Java run time. However, you have to adapt the path settings in the shell scripts accordingly. These are the required files:

PortalServer_root/base/wp.xml.client/bin/wp.xml.client.jar
PortalServer_root/base/wp.base/shared/app/wp.base.jar
PortalServer_root/base/wp.base/shared/app/wp.engine.impl.jar
PortalServer_root/base/wp.base/shared/app/wp.utilities.streams.jar
AppServer_root/lib/j2ee.jar
AppServer_root/lib/bootstrap.jar
AppServer_root/lib/com.ibm.ws.runtime.jar
AppServer_root/plugins/j2ee.jar
AppServer_root/plugins/com.ibm.wps.emf.jar
AppServer_root/plugins/org.eclipse.emf.ecore.jar
AppServer_root/plugins/org.eclipse.emf.common.jar
PortalServer_root/bin/xmlaccess.sh or PortalServer_root\bin\xmlaccess.bat, depending on your operating system.
wp_profile_root/PortalServer/bin/xmlaccess.sh

Note: When you update your portal by installing fix packs, these files might be updated. In such cases make sure that you always use the most recent versions of these files.