Customizing

Customize IBM® Connections to fit your environment.

Customize IBM Connections to fit your environment. This documentation is provided to help you customize your deployment of IBM Connections. IBM Support can address questions about the customization process, but cannot address questions about the particulars of your customization. If you customized an earlier version of IBM Connections, there is no migration path provided for importing your changes into IBM Connections 4.5 or later. Before upgrading, review and make a note of your existing customizations so that you can verify them post-migration and rework if necessary. In addition, customization work might no longer be valid if a customized file is updated with a subsequent fix pack or interim fix.

Additional information about the CSS and HTML markup structure used in IBM Connections is available in the IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) UI Developer Guide at:
http://infolib.lotus.com/resources/oneui/3.0/docPublic/index.htm

Review these topics to help you customize IBM Connections for your organization, or to help you build components that integrate with IBM Connections.

Customization best practices
Use the following guidelines to help you to implement and manage customizations in your deployment of IBM Connections.
Customizing the user interface
The procedure to customize IBM Connections is the same for each application. You must edit a copy of the relevant source file and save it in the appropriate customization directory.
Customizing notifications
The content of the notifications sent by IBM Connections is defined in templates that are processed by the FreeMarker engine.
Adding new ways to share content
Create your own gadgets and add them to the Share dialog.
Customizing a blog theme
Customize a blog theme to change the look of a blog. Or create a new theme and make it available to your blog users.
Adding a custom theme to Communities
Community owners can customize the appearance of a community by choosing from a selection of themes that change the colors used in the community. Administrators can modify or add to the selection of default themes provided with Communities by customizing the existing themes, or by defining custom themes and adding them to the Communities configuration file, communities-config.xml.
Customizing Metrics reports
Metrics data displays as reports, which you can customize for your organization. When you install IBM Cognos® Business Intelligence to support the Metrics application, a set of standard reports is immediately available. You can customize the standard reports by editing the configuration file that defines each report’s layout. In addition, you can use IBM Cognos Report Studio to create new reports.
Customizing Profiles
Customize the Profiles application to define the core data model for people within your deployment and tailor the presentation of profile content to meet your organization’s requirements.
Using Profiles and Communities business cards
Extend your web application by integrating the Profiles and Communities business cards in to the application.
Customizing the Wikis welcome page
Customize the welcome page of the Wikis application.
Post-customization step
Edit a configuration property so users see your changes the next time they log in, without having to clear their web browser cache.

Related concepts:

Saving your customizations