Improving performance for remote servers

The Easy Edit feature of your iMIS content management website might be sluggish on some of your external web servers due to latency in communicating with the iMIS database. For example, it is common for your public-facing web servers to be hosted at a different data center than your iMIS database. You can improve performance by setting up a mirror of the website on your iMIS application server, then directing your frequent Easy Edit users to the appserver’s URL for the website instead of using the public URL.

Note: If your Easy Edit users are working at computers that are outside your organization’s firewall, they will need VPN access (or access through a terminal server, for example) to connect to the appserver-hosted version of the website.

Changes to the website’s content records and navigation items that are made on any server that hosts the website are automatically picked up by every other server when you publish the changes. However, images that are uploaded during Easy Edit sessions must be manually copied to all other servers. Additionally, changes that your web admins make to the site’s CSS, master page, and other aspects of the site’s template on one server must also be manually copied to all other servers.

The following procedure assumes that you already have an external iMIS content management website on which your Easy Edit users are experiencing slow performance. You will be changing the website’s definition to also host the website on your application server, then advising your Easy Edit users to use the new appserver-hosted website for their Easy Edit sessions:

  1. Modify the website’s definition to specify that it be hosted by your iMIS application server as well.
    1. Go to RiSE > Site Builder > Manage websites.
    2. Select the website you want to modify.
    3. Click Edit.
    4. In the URL(s) pointing to the IIS website root field, enter a comma-delimited list of URLs that point to the root of the iMIS application on your iMIS appserver and to the root of the iMIS content management application that you installed on each external web server. For example, if you already had two external web servers defined for this website, the list should look similar to the following when you have added the URL that points to your iMIS appserver: 
      5. http://www.mypublicdomain1.org/wcm/,http://www.mypublicdomain2.org/wcm/,http://www.myiMISappserver.com/iMIS/ 
    5. If using security certificates, add the secure addresses to the Secure URL(s) pointing to the IIS website root field in the same order as above.

      6. Note: Restart IIS whenever you change the Secure URL(s) pointing to the IIS website root setting. Note that localhost is not a valid Secure URL.

    6. Click Save to save your changes.
    7. Click Cancel.
    8. From the toolbar, click Publish. Select Publish children as well? to publish all of the website’s navigation items to the new instance of this website on the iMIS application server.
    9. Click OK. Note that the website’s content records will not be visible on this new instance until a later step. It may take up to 15 minutes for the public and internal sites to reflect the updated navigation.
    10. Click Close.
  2. Modify the definition of all content folders used by this website to also publish their content records to the new instance of this website on the iMIS application server. This will usually be only the website’s root content folder (the one with the same name as the website itself), but your organization might also have some additional content folders that are used for content shared among several different websites.
    1. Go to RiSE > Page Builder > Manage content.
    2. Select the content folder you want to configure.
    3. Click Edit.
    4. From the Publish on Servers drop-down:
      • If the current value is Inherit, do not change the value.
      • If the value is Custom, then leave all currently selected checkboxes and also select the checkbox for the publishing server code used by your iMIS application server.    
    5. Click Save to save your changes.
    6. Click Cancel.
    7. From the toolbar, select Publish. Select Publish All Items to include all of the folder’s content records.
    8. Click OK.
    9. Click Close. Repeat the steps for each content folder used by the website.
  3. Make sure the website’s template files exist on the public iMIS content management server, the appserver, and the internal iMIS content management server, if applicable. If the files are missing from any of the servers, manually copy the files to the corresponding locations.
  4. Visit your public iMIS content management website and the appserver’s website to verify that your changes are successful.
  5. Advise your frequent Easy Edit users to visit the URL for the iMIS appserver-hosted instance of the website and avoid using the public-facing URLs.