Duct Tape System Admin: Lotus Notes 8.5: How to reset forgotten user id password

I am by no stretch of the imagination a Lotus Notes expert but I do have to support it on occasion as part of my system admin duties. The other day one my users said he couldn’t log on to his Lotus Notes client. Usually my first inclination is to assume the person forgot his password and to reset the user id password. No big deal. The thing is we had recently upgraded to Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.1 from 8.0 and when I went to look for the familiar options in Lotus Domino something had changed.

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

Enter your admin password

Select the user’s ID file

Lotus will generate a recovery password. Make note of password.

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)