New HCL DX and DX Compose CF238 Features & Enhancements Available + September 2026 Latest News

HCL Digital Experience Digital Experience Forum
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Learn Best Practices for Managing HCL DX platforms from the Experts
In the HCL TX Webinar Series

September 2025

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This month HCL Software offers:

HCL Digital Experience offerings v9.5 updates are available for entitled downloads through the My HCLSoftware portal platform to access software and manage deployments.

HCL Digital Experience v9.5 version CF238 updates and benefits:

  • Content authors and site designers can leverage new Practitioner Studio widgets, Presentation Designer features, Blueprint and DAM Collection UX updates to add productivity for site updates and releases. The first release of a new Core Rich Text Editor is available for preview.

  • Administrators have new controls to manage DAM subscriber verifications which can reduce overall operations cost and complexity.

  • Updated UBI levels

HCL Digital Experience Compose v9.5 version CF238 adds these updates and benefits:.

  • Developers and content authors gain support for a new modern Web Content Manager (WCM) REST API v3. The WCM REST API v3 provides streamlined access to WCM content, libraries, site areas, categories, taxonomies, and presentation templates with simplified JSON payloads.

  • Administrators have more granular controls to define and manage users and groups in distinct virtual portals, and new parameters to control how custom secrets are applied to pods

  • Updated OpenLiberty, JRE and UBI support levels

Key Features and Benefits

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 Container Update and CF 238 (All Versions)

  • Practitioner Studio Dashboard - New widgets - The Practitioner Studio Dashboard introduces two new widgets; My Sites and Recently Modified pages to streamline site navigation and content management.

  • Presentation Designer - Feature updates - Site Designers and authors can now embed raw HTML markup directly into a presentation template, resize the Container and Grid static elements directly on the canvas, and use the Save as draft option to save your presentation template as a Draft override stylesheet.

  • Core Editor - New rich text editor option – The initial release of a new Core rich text editor is available in preview for creation of new content.

  • Java 8 is required for future CF upgrades – If upgrading older or unchanged HCL DX 8.5 environments on WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 8.5.5, you must verify that the active WAS SDK and target profile use Java 8 before applying CF238 or higher cumulative fixes. Java 8 is also required for DX v9 and v9.5.

  • The DX Help Center Doc IQ AI chatbot assistance adds natural language topic search for the DX Help Center that can speed access to guidance supporting deployments.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 Container Update and CF 238 (K8s deployments)

  • DAM - Enhanced staging to handle secret rotation DAM staging now supports periodic heartbeat verification to manage subscriber connections during secret rotation to detect connectivity issues and automatically disable or re-enable subscribers when authentication credentials change.

  • DAM - New parameters for setting the initial collections view -Site designers can configure the initial view for Digital Asset Management (DAM) collections

  • WAS. JDK and UBI levels – This release updates the Red Hat UBI levels

HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9 versions

  • Extended Support option is available for DX versions 8.5 and 9.0 – Customers needing support to update to 9.5 from EOS DX versions 8.5 and 9.0 can sign up for an Extended Support option.

  • Automatically apply 9.5 from a later CF installation – Administrators can speed upgrading to the latest DX 9.5 version from V8.5 & 9 using the CF Update process, now set as the default (configurable) setting.

HCL Digital Experience Compose v9.5

HCL Digital Experience Compose v9.5 is a separately available lightweight, fast performing, cloud–only digital experience platform for delivering content-centric and transactional experiences. DX Compose includes a core container called WebEngine that is built on the Open Liberty platform and operates on Certified Kubernetes platforms.

Key Features and Benefits

HCL Digital Experience Compose 9.5 CF 238 (K8s deployments)

HCL Digital Experience Compose v9.5 CF238 adds many of the new capabilities available with DX CF 238 Container update, and:

  • LDAP virtual portal realm support now available– Administrators can configure DX Compose to support multiple OpenLDAP servers with dedicated realms per virtual portal.

  • New parameters for configuring secrets - Two new parameters are now available to control how custom secrets are applied to pods in the values.yaml file.

  • WCM REST API v3 now available - A modern REST API for Web Content Manager (WCM) v3 provides streamlined access to WCM content, libraries, site areas, categories, taxonomies, and presentation templates with simplified JSON payloads, OpenAPI 3.0 integration, and a built-in API Explorer.

DX Compose entitled software is available through the My HCLSoftware portal for customers licensed for the HCL Digital Experience Compose offering. Also see the HCL Support Knowledge Article

HCL DX Compose Evaluation software: Is available for HCL DX customers with select offering entitlements. See this HCL Digital Experience Developer Community post and HCL Support Knowledge Article.

See the latest features and updates in action in the HCL Digital Experience section of HCLSoftware U and the What’s New for Digital Experience section for more information.

HCL Leap 9.3.13

Analyst Reports, Webinars and Education

Webinar: Beyond LDAP: Strengthening DX Security with Modern Cloud Identity – Thursday, August 20, 2026

Identity has become the new security perimeter. While LDAP has been a trusted foundation for enterprise authentication, modern cloud identity providers offer advanced capabilities such as MFA, passwordless authentication, and adaptive access controls to help organizations meet today’s security challenges. Join HCL DX Security engineer Jason Wicker as he shares practical guidance for evaluating and planning a move from LDAP to cloud-based identity services. Learn about key considerations, common challenges, and the security benefits of modernizing identity for your HCL DX environment. Speaker: Jason Wicker, HCL DX Lead Software engineer. View the replay at: https://hclsw.co/tx-recordings

How the New Mexico Department of Health is Transforming Digital Health Access using HCL DX

In this discussion, the CIO of the NM DOH shares the strategic roadmap behind their massive digital transformation. Moving away from a legacy ASP.NET system that created severe IT bottlenecks, the department is building a modern, highly accessible, and personalized hub for public health information. Key topics covered in this interview:

- Breaking the Bottleneck: How the NM DOH is decentralizing content publishing to empower teams and speed up updates.

- Massive Scale Integration: The strategy for consolidating over 200 external sites and payment gateways into a single, scalable framework without relying on iframes.

- Responsible AI Adoption: A look at their “crawl” phase approach to AI, prioritizing data classification and the security of sensitive PII/PHI data. View the 10-minute discussion here.

Governance in the Age of Vibe Coding: Who’s Accountable? Thursday September 30, 2026

AI can code, test, and commit. But who’s accountable when it reaches production?

Explore how HCL Vibe Studio brings governance, security, and control to agentic development, so enterprises can move fast with confidence. Register now!

HCL DX Autumn Webinar- Thursday October 14, 2026 11:00 - 12:00

Join us for the October DX Webinar, where we’ll round up some important recent developments including:

  • Practitioner Studio Dashboard: Streamline daily tasks with a centralized dashboard offering with widgets, quick links, and info hub to help you manage content.

  • WCM v3 API: Empower developers with a modernized, more flexible, efficient and easier to use API to seamlessly deliver content across any channel and build headless digital experiences.

  • IQ Assistant: Leverage AI-powered assistance to instantly answer user queries and guide users in content creation and management. Register to attend and for the replay here

How AI is Redefining Digital Experiences with HCL DX – Thursday, August 13, 2026

AI is changing the way organizations engage customers and citizens—but what does that look like in practice? Join Streebo to see how AI-powered solutions built on HCL DX are delivering personalized experiences, intelligent search, content automation, and measurable results through real customer success stories like a city in Ontario, Canada. Speaker: Rahul Sharma, Customer Solutions Leader, Streebo Register and view the replay at: https://hclsw.co/tx-recordings

Are you looking for training for HCL DX capabilities and best practices? Do you have new team members just getting started, or are you an experienced HCL DX expert and need to understand the latest capabilities? Access over 50 free courses available for you on the HCL Software Business U, organized by proficiency level and role and strengthen your expertise. Register, Select Product – Digital Experience, check out the Digital Experience Technical Navigator, and build up your self-paced learning today!

Keep your product requests coming in!

Contributions from our experienced and new HCL DX practitioners help us prioritize DX and DX Compose requirements for continuous delivery releases. Let us know your key requests and how they can help improve your platform operations and business goals. Visit the HCL Digital Experience Ideas Portal to review requests and submit yours. https://dx-ideas.hcltechsw.com/

Participate in discussions of DX platform successes, challenges and best practices approaches with community leaders and expert practitioners in an open conversation at the HCL Digital Solutions Developer Community https://developer.ds.hcl-software.com/ and DX User Group: https://www.dxers.ug/