Lotus Notes 8.5: How to reset forgotten user id password
I started reading the documentation and from what I gathered Lotus Notes 8.5 gives you two main methods to manage your user passwords. The new method introduced in version 8.5 is the Notes ID Vault which is supposed to make managing user IDs much easier. Since I didn’t have this option configured I had to do it ‘old school’. But like I said earlier - something changed in Domino 8.5 (I hate it when IBM does that). Again the documentation does explain how to do it but it was not as step-by-step as I would have liked. Anyway, the following worked for me.
First, the Lotus Administrator has to:
- Run Lotus Domino Administrator
- Click Configuration tab, Extract Recovery Password
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- Enter your admin password
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- Select the user’s ID file
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- Lotus will generate a recovery password. Make note of password.
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Second, the user has to:
- Run Lotus Notes
- Click Exit (Not very intuitive is it?). (Author’s note: from what I read in the documentation if you enter the wrong password then click the ‘Log In’ button it is supposed to give you the ‘forgot password’ option but that does not work for the majority of my users)
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- Select ‘Try to recover your password’ then click OK
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- Enter the recovery password generated earlier in Lotus Admin
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- Select the user’s ID file
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- The user will be prompted to enter a new password
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That’s it… if successful the user will be able to log in to Lotus Notes.