Lotus Connection x 4

Every now and then I like to set myself and ISW a short term target around specific offerings. In November last year I set a personal target of ISW working with 4 clients to review and decide to implement Connections before Xmas. Well we nearly got there with 3 out of 4 sales completed before xmas. Pretty good but not the 4 out of 4 I was aiming for.

Well I have just found out that we just received the order for the 4th order on Friday so I am wrapped.

The customers come from a range of different industries and each have approached Connections from a different angle:
 - First is a large truck company that has a significant investment in Notes/Domino and Portal already. They want to use Connections initially internally to enhance the sharing of Profile/Expertise knowledge as well as the ability to create shared bookmarks. We will be integrating Connections fully with their Portal environment.
- Second is a small business of about 30 users however they are also the largest international racehorse transport company. They operate in offices in the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand and use Notes & Domino to co-ordinate the business processes required to move horses from country to country. They are very successful and Notes is a big part of how they do it but that is another story. They are going to implement Sametime and Connections to increase the awareness and collaboration between their sites. They are one team and they want to share their knowledge and make themselves "closer".
- Third is quite interesting. They are part of the Catholic Education Office in Australia and they wanted to provide an online White Pages Directory of up to 70,000 school teachers/staff etc. They have gone with a Connections Extranet server and initially will just implement Profiles however as this grows to the other features I think it is quite exciting.
- Lastly, the 4th is the Australian division of a multinational printer and copier company. They rolled out 20 users a couple of months ago and have found is has spread well. They have now increased their user count by another 50 and plan to let it spread thru out the entire business over time.

So Connections is a very hot product for ISW and IBM. I will be spending plenty of time at the various Connections sessions at Lotusphere to pick up some tips that might help. I wonder what target I should set for other new customers for the next few months!

Starting up Lotus Connections automatically

Having installed Lotus Connections using WAS Network Deployment to start the Lotus Connections servers up I do the following:

restart the server (This also starts the Deployment Manager as a Windows Service)
Start the Node Agent  - D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\bin\startNode.bat
Once the Node Agent has started I can start the Connections servers (I have server1, server2, and server3) from the Deployment Manager Integrated Solutions Console.

I want to change this process so that the Node Agent and the Connections server's all start automatically when the server is restarted.

So here's how:  

Setting up the WebSphere Node Manager as a Windows service

First, you need to set up the Node Manager on each physical server to run as a service and restart after a reboot:

   1. Open a Command Window and go to the ..\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\bin directory
   2. Type in the following command (adjusted for your install paths):

    WASService -add "IBM WebSphere Node Agent" -servername nodeagent -profilePath D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01 -wasHome D:\IBM\Websphere\Appserver -logFile D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent\startNode.log -logRoot D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent -restart true -startType automatic

Setting up the member servers to automatically restart

Once the Node Manager is running as a service, you need to set the individual WebSphere servers to automatically restart using the following steps:

   1. Log in to the Integrated Solutions Console
   2. Navigate to Servers > Application servers > servername
   3. Expand Java and Process Management and click on Monitoring Policy
   4. Change the Node restart state to RUNNING
   5. Click Apply
   6. Click Save to save the master configuration
   7. Repeat for each server in the cluster

And that should do it. So when you restart your server the nodeagent should firstly start as a service and then it should monitor the servers and start them automatically. 

Connections 2.5 - Step 5 - INSTALL CONNECTIONS!

Right so we should have all the pre-install steps completed. WASND installed, Dmgr running, server1 profile created (unmanaged node, not running), security setup (using LDAP federated repository in this case), DB2 installed, databases created, TDI installed, Profiles database populated.

So now we can install Lotus Connections 2.5

But before we do...one more thing. Sometimes when you install Connections we can get a SOAP time out error. In order to avoid this error we need to increate the time that the server allows for a SOAP request. We need to modify the com.ibm.SOAP.requestTimeout property in the install_root/properties/soap.client.props file. Just open this file in Wordpad, search for "soap.request", and change the value to 300 or 600 (I did 600 just to be sure). Detailed instructions are here.

So now that we are really ready we need to make sure the Deployment Manager is running and the Application Server instance we will use to install Connections (server1) is not running.

Then we run the install.bat file from the extract of file 1 of 12 from the downloads. The Info Center is pretty good for these steps so just follow the prompts as per this document. You can choose to install all the Features onto the one server however I decided to split the features across 3 servers just to spread the load. The Lotus Connections install will automatically create the additional server profiles for you if you decide to do this as well. I guess it would be wise to try and spread the estimated load across all 3 of the servers however it is really dependent on your usage plans as to how you do this.

The install takes a good while but you should be able to just let it run. Once the install is complete it will provide you with a list of the URL's to each feature. You just need to start each of the servers (as long as the nodeagent is running you can start the servers from the Dmgr Integrated Solutions Console) and off you go! Be Social, Explore, Collaborate!

There are some post install tasks (such as testing the database connections, more security, configuring IBM HTTP server etc) that are listed in the Info Center but you should have a Connections system up and running. 

Connections 2.5 - Step 4 - Install TDI

So once the Database server is ready and the Lotus Connections databases created the next step is to populate the Profiles database with your user information. To do this we use Tivoli Directory Integrator and run a the provided TDI script that will pull the data from your ldap directory and populate the Profiles database.

Now the Lotus Connections Info Center tells us that we need at least TDI 6.1.1 with Fix Pack 6. This can again be downloaded from Fix Central. Do a search for the Fix ID "*0006" and download the fix pack.

Once you have installed TDI and the fix pack that is really all you have to do for now specifically on TDI. You can later set TDI up to run the Profiles population script periodically but for now you just need it installed.

So now you need to copy the Lotus Connections Wizards directory (extracted from file download 2 of 12) onto the TDI server and run the populationWizard.bat file. Just follow the prompts and provide the data required about your LDAP server and the location of your database server.

And that is it for this step. We now have a server with WASND (DMgr and unmanaged node server1), Security enabled, DB2 server with databases created and Profiles database populated from the LDAP database.

Finally we are ready for the actual Lotus Connections install! Coming up next.... 

Connections 2.5 - Step 3 - Databases

So I am going to use DB2 Enterprise Server that is provided as part of the Connections license. You can install this on the same server as your WAS for a small site however I am going to install onto a separate server.

Now note that the Software Requirements tell us we need either DB2 9.1 FP6 or 9.5 FP3. So once again we go to Fix Central and download the fix pack. Interestingly (as CuriousMitch points out) it seems the FP3 appears to be a full install rather than a fix so I have downloaded this and will start with this.

IBM Db2 Enterprise Server Edn V9.5 for Windows  Fix Pack 3 - Download here

Installing DB2 Enterprise Server & Registering the license
The actual install is pretty straight forward so just follow the prompts and choose the options you want for your environment.

Once installed you can either follow the instructions here to install the DB2 restricted license key or you can use the License Centre.




Using the Database Wizard to create the Lotus Connections Database
Next we create a dedicated user for Lotus Connection, lcuser - Doco Here . This user us used by the Lotus Connections database wizard to create all of the databases required.

Once that is all ready make sure the DB2 instance is running (should be set to run as a service already) and run the db wizard - dbWizard.bat  (extracted from the 2 of 12 file in downloads). This wizard will run for a while as it creates all of the databases needed for the Connections services. We are only having one DB2 server instance at this point but you can choose to install the databases on separate servers for scaling reasons if needed.

So that is the Database ready to go. Next we will install Tivoli Directory Integrator and populate the Profiles database.