Notes IDs and passwords

When users connect to their mail servers in the cloud with IBM® Notes® clients and Notes IDs, they are authenticated using Notes Remote Procedure Call (NRPC) authentication.

In service-only environments, and in hybrid environments that do not use on-premises security policy settings to configure password requirements, Notes ID passwords must be at least eight characters. Passwords must also have a password quality of 8, on a quality scale of 0 (weakest) to 16 (strongest). Password quality refers to the required character complexity of passwords. In hybrid environments, you can use on-premises security policy settings to control password requirements.

By default, Notes ID passwords do not expire and keeping this default behavior is recommended. Nevertheless, you can configure a password expiration interval of from 30 to 3650 days through the SmartCloud Notes Administration interface. In hybrid environments, you do not control password expiration through an on-premises policy, but you can use a policy to enable a warning to be displayed to users when their passwords are due to expire.

If users forget their Notes ID passwords, company administrators can use the SmartCloud Notes Administration interface to reset the passwords to temporary values. The users use the temporary passwords to log in to the service from a Notes client and then are prompted to change the passwords.

The Notes shared login feature is supported in hybrid environments. This feature allows users to log in to Microsoft Windows and then use the Notes client without providing a Notes ID password. A benefit of this feature is there are no Notes ID passwords to use or remember.

The Notes client can connect automatically to the cloud service instant messaging community and to cloud service Activities through the client sidebar. (Access to service Activities requires a collaboration subscription). After users log on to the service mail server from the Notes client, a single-sign on capability enables them to access these cloud services during the session without providing their cloud service account login credentials. A Notes client can be configured to connect to both on-premises and cloud instant messaging servers or Activities servers through the sidebar. In this case, users must provide their cloud service login credentials to access the cloud servers.