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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.
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.
Choose the type of group to use
HCL Digital Experience offers many types of groups and locations to store the groups. Choosing the type of group and the location the groups are stored is an important step in planning for using groups with HCL Portal.

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.
  - 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.
    - Choose the type of group to use
      HCL Digital Experience offers many types of groups and locations to store the groups. Choosing the type of group and the location the groups are stored is an important step in planning for using groups with HCL Portal.
    - Managing users and groups
      The Manage Users and Groups portlet allows you to view, create, and delete users and user groups. You can also change group memberships.
    - Rule-based user groups
      Rule-based user groups for HCL Portal allow you to define dynamic portal user groups.
    - Creating new users and groups
      Use this topic to create new users and groups by using the portlet and adding them to an existing group.
    - Viewing the members of a group
      Display a list of all the group members for a particular user group.
    - Editing user information
      Edit user information such as password, User ID, first name, last name, email address, or preferred language.
    - Reusing group information
      During the authentication of a user, IBM WebSphere Application Server stores information about which groups users belong to. This information is static for the authentication session of the user. In addition, it can be provided by an External Security Manager through a Trust Association Interceptor. In this case, IBM WebSphere Application Server does not load the information on its own. HCL Digital Experience can participate in this flow and reuse the information from the WebSphere Application Server security context instead of retrieving it from the LDAP server. This function is also referred to as group assertion or WebSphere Application Server group assertion.
    - Deleting users and groups
      You can delete a user or user group from HCL Portal.
    - Virtual users and user groups
      There are two predefined virtual user groups (All Authenticated Portal Users and All Portal User Groups) and one virtual user (Anonymous Portal User). These predefined virtual groups and user allow for access control configuration that applies to abstract sets of users. They are not stored in the user registry. They only exist within the access control context. You cannot change group membership or other attributes of these virtual usergroups and user.
    - Administering user impersonation
      Use the impersonation feature to access another user's system as though you are that user. Use caution with this configuration. The user who is doing the impersonation might get more permissions than initially granted to them.
    - Customize common name generation
      By default, HCL Digital Experience generates common names that consists of the user's first name followed by the last name. You can change the order that common names are generated.
    - Nested groups
      Two groups are nested if one of the groups contains the other group as a member. The access control system treats nested groups as though all members of the contained group are also members of the containing group. In other words, permissions for nested groups are treated as cumulative.
    - Registration/Edit My Profile and Login portlets
      In HCL Portal, the Registration/Edit My Profile and Login portlets reside on special pages where the anonymous user has access rights based on the User role.
    - 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.
  - 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.

Choose the type of group to use | HCL Digital Experience

HCL Digital Experience offers many types of groups and locations to store the groups. Choosing the type of group and the location the groups are stored is an important step in planning for using groups with HCL Portal.

The following list provides a summary of available options for using groups in HCL Portal.

File Repository: Type of group: Static only; Advantage: Configured with your initial installation; Disadvantage: Not supported in production systems
LDAP: Type of group: Static, Nested (optional), Dynamic (optional); Advantage: LDAP is an established industry protocol, which can integrate with multiple applications. In most use cases, HCL Portal connects to and uses existing groups in an LDAP server.; Disadvantage: LDAPs are only required to support static groups. Individual LDAP vendors might optionally choose to support both nested and dynamic groups or to support either nested group or dynamic group. Check with your LDAP administrator to determine which type of groups your LDAP supports. If you have more requirements for using groups, consider to use an LDAP location and another location for the groups that are listed next.
Virtual Member Manager Federated database: Type of group: Static only; Advantage: Useful in situations where LDAP is read-only and needs more groups specific to Portal. Allows for cross-repository groups, that is, users from LDAP#1 and users from LDAP#2 may exist in the same database group.; Disadvantage: Groups are not accessible outside of the HCL Portal server.
Rule Based User Groups: Type of group: Dynamic only; Advantage: Provides dynamic group functions to HCL Portal in cases where an LDAP server does not support dynamic groups.; Disadvantage: Only supported by HCL Portal. Other WebSphere Application Server based products cannot use these groups. Groups are accessible outside of the HCL Portal server.