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Component Pack offerings

The Component Pack for HCL Connections introduces new connectivity capabilities that enhance collaboration and boost productivity.

Customizer

HCL Connections Customizer is a proxy service that lets you modify the Connections user experience. Customizer intercepts and modifies requests from clients and responses from servers, so it can customize anything that flows through it, such as the behavior of APIs or the look-and-feel of the user interface.

Orient Me

The Orient Me (Top Updates) page on the home page provides your users with a cognitive view of their most essential Connections content. It shows users prioritized updates, with content from the people and communities they interact with the most at the top and grouped by source, or viewed as a single stream based on time. For more information, see Top Updates: Keeping up with what's most relevant to you on the end-user documentation.

Opensearch

Opensearch is installed as a step of the Component Pack installation process. This service is used as the storage and retrieval service for the Metrics, Type-ahead Search, Orient Me, and Elastic Stack features.

Starting with Component Pack 8, Opensearch is the default and only backend for Metrics, Search, and Orient Me.

Tailored experience for communities

A new experience makes it easier for users to create engaging Connections communities faster.

  • A creation wizard makes community setup easy.
  • Templates populate new communities with layouts, community applications, and content such as files, wikis, and blogs.
  • Highlights page configuration seamlessly integrates standard Connections apps with dynamic and configurable widgets on your community's landing page.

Microsoft Teams integration

The Microsoft Teams integration services allow Connections content to be displayed or referenced by link in a number of ways in the Microsoft Teams desktop, browser, and mobile experiences. Connections application content (such as community highlights, activities, blogs, and so on) can be selected to be displayed as a tab within a Teams channel, and links to content can be shared in the conversation stream of channels or in personal chats.

Connections Outlook add-in for Microsoft Outlook

With the Connections add-in for Microsoft Outlook, users can to work with Connections content from within their Outlook inbox. Users can do the following with the Connections add-in:

  • Upload Outlook emails and attachments to Connections Files, Activities or Wikis, or directly as a status post.
  • When composing a message, search Connections Profiles for a name and insert it into one of the address fields.
  • Find and share Connections files with recipients by attaching as a link in an email, ensuring everyone is using the same version.
  • Upload files from their computer to Connections and share with recipients by attaching as a link in an email.

Activities Plus (for Connections Activities)

With Activities Plus, your users can view an activity as a board, giving them the option to drag and drop their Tasks and Entries, and filter the content of their boards by person, by priority, by color, and more. Activities Plus uses the existing Component Pack infrastructure and is seamlessly integrated with Connections on-premises applications such as Communities, Files, Activity Streams (Orient Me), and the Connections mobile application. Activities Plus is the team collaboration tool (replacement of Connections Activities) that makes work easier and more intuitive. Existing Connections activities can be converted and imported to boards, where users can continue to work in a more modern and effective way. Activities Plus uses the Mongo database already deployed as part of the Component Pack.

Parent topic:Installing or upgrading Component Pack for Connections