Icon UK Presentation - External Users in Connections 5

Today I am finishing my presentation for ICON UK on external users in Connections 5.  There’s a lot to cover and I’m trying to run neither over or under time and pull off the goldilocks of presentations covering…

  • How external access works
  • What can external users do (and not do)
  • How your internal users interact with external users
  • Configuring external user access
  • Securing the perimeter
  • Implications and things to think about…

I’ll post the presentation here once I’m done but of course it won’t come with me talking over each page (is that good or bad?)  - so if you can make it to Icon tomorrow at IBM South Bank in London, I hope to see you there.  My session is at 11am.

 

WebSphere Things That Drive Me Insane - Pt..um.. 3

I actually like WebSphere. Honestly I do.  But it really really does not like Domino and Domino is my first love (well 2nd love.. ccMail you’ll always be first in my heart).  I have always run into problems configuring Domino within WebSphere mostly due to the fact that Domino LDAP isn’t always hierarchical the way every other LDAP is.  Back in the original Sametime 8.5 days we couldn’t have users of ST who didn’t have hierarchical names and we used to have to fake a hierarchy (C=US) to trick WebSphere.

My latest hair tearing out insanity is shown below.  To configure external users for Connections you can choose to set up an alternate LDAP source - in this case I’m using a dedicated Domino server I can make publicly available for people to register themselves.  Here are my repositories set up in WebSphere showing the two Domino LDAP sources..

LDAP1 is our internal directory LDAP SSO the external / public facing

LDAP1 is our internal directory
LDAP SSO the external / public facing

Here’s the fun bit.. this is what the federated repositories actually look like in WebSphere

As soon as I added the external Domino LDAP repository it changed the original internal one to the external one so that’s listed twice.  Try and add it again and it adds the same one a third time.  Even more hilarious, only the original (unlisted) one actually works and lists / authenticates users.

And yes, if I try and delete one it actually deletes all three.  Off I go to edit some XML files….I’ll post a fix when I get there