HCL Connections 6.5 : Activities Plus doc and setup tips

HCL Connections 6.5 , contains inside the Component pack 6.5 a new version of  activity, build by ISW , named  Activities Plus.

If you already know Kudos Boards (I'm a big fan) , it's a sort of Boards light where MindMap and Timeline are not available that gives a better way to use one of the most outdated component of Connections.
This apps increase the value of the component pack because runs reusing the infrastructure component already deployed for the other parts.

In this post I like to recap some setup tips and share an installation line because in my opinion the official docs isn't written in a correct logical sequence so reading these lines before the setup could help.


License

Activities Plus it's free but  customer needs to request a licenst to ISW .
A registration process will drive the customers and they will receive a license in a few minutes. This license will be inserted in the most important pieces of this setup  boards-cp.yaml that will include all configuration data of the applications involved..

WebSphere Config

Once the customer has received the license  the next steps are some WAS configs to register the new oauth application, place that setting in the connectionsProvider.xml and save the client secret for the  boards-cp.yaml . This process is well described in this page.


Setup

All the configs like license, admins, OAuth secrets,NFSserver ,etc  must be inserted inside the boards-cp.yaml .
This file it's located where you have unzipped the component pack  in this path:

/microservices_connections/hybridcloud/support/kudos-boards



A description of the options could be found in the HCL docs and on KudosApps docs site. 
Before proceed with the setup I've upgraded the helm chart with the one linked inside this HCL technote.


Tips

SetupImages
One of the first steps of component pack setup it's uploading the images in customer docker registry and the setupImages.sh included in the component pack 6.5.0.0 it's bugged.

To be sure to upload all the images, use the one linked in this HCL technote..

NFS moung
Setup process suppose a customer is using   /pv-connections/ as NFS mount point.
If you are using a different one, you needs to specify the correct path inside the  boards-cp.yaml (thanks Urs)


minio:
     persistentVolumePath: yourCustomPath
     nfs:
     server: 10.1.2.3



Migrazione Activities

The last setup part is the migration of the activities from the old app,
Unfortunately the migration of some of my activities was hanging and restarting the migration pod wasn't helpful because the state was remembered.

ISW support suggested me to insert inside  boards-cp.yaml the following options

     PURGE_INCOMPLETE: true
     PURGE_MIGRATED_ACTIVITY_IDS: ActivityID1,ActivityID2,..

and proceed with a redeploy of the   kudos-boards-cp-activity-migration .
This purged the migration queue and this time I was able to complete the migration.

Be careful to use this setting and remember to remove that after you have deployed the app.