Hiding email addresses in IBM Connections 6.0

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At the beginning of this month I had to raise my first support case (formerly known as pmr) with IBM because of faulty documentation. I wanted to remove email addresses from a small IBM Connections environment where people from different companies would be working together. Luckily the Connections documentation from IBM tells you exactly how to do that, except… it doesn’t.

The instructions are clear enough:

  1. Open a command prompt and then change to the following directory on the WebSphere® Application Server that hosts IBM Connections:
    /opt/IBM/Connections/ConfigEngine
  2. Run the script that configures IBM Connections to hide email addresses:
    ./ConfigEngine.sh action-hide-email > /tmp/hide_email.log 2>&1
  3. Remove email address references from user profiles
  4. Restart the server

The problem with this description is that the ConfigEngine directory hasn’t been part of the standard IBM Connections installation for a very long time. The developers of IBM did realise that and created another, better and simpler, way to remove the email addresses from your IBM Connections environment. If only they had documented it…

So if you want to remove the email addresses from your environment, these are the steps to take:

  1. Edit the LotusConnections-Config.xml file
  2. Set <exposeEmail enabled=”false”>
  3. Once this setting has been added, check the LotusConnections-Config.xml file back in.
  4. After the file is checked in, synch all nodes and restart Connections.

I hope IBM will update their documentation soon.