HCL Domino 14.5 Early Access Program Drop 1 introduces new features and enhancements in several areas.

The following components are no longer included in Domino 14.5.

Accessibility features help users who have a physical disability, such as restricted mobility or limited vision, to use information technology products.

This release of the HCL Domino® Administrator and Notes® client applications provides translations of the product screens into the following languages.

Because Domino Administrator Help is a Notes application, you can use familiar Notes gestures to find information.

Perform a new or upgrade install of one or many Domino® servers.

AutoUpdate notifies you of the latest HCL Domino and Domino product family available on the Domino server, and allows you to download the software. You can also use it to distribute, and optionally, install, software to groups or selected Domino servers.

Use this documentation to upgrade the existing Domino® server and subsequently upgrade the Notes® client to a new release. You can also upgrade additional clients such as Domino Administrator and Domino Designer clients and additional features and plug-ins such as the embedded HCL Sametime® client.

Use this as a tool when planning how to integrate HCL Domino® into your existing environment.

Servers must connect to each other to exchange data, for example to replicate databases and exchange mail. You can create connections between servers across a local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN), by using a pass-through server (a server that acts as an intermediary server between a client and its destination), or over the Internet. Create a Server Connection document whenever you need to establish any new or additional server connections. You can modify this document when necessary.

HCL Domino® provides a range of directory service features.

HCL Domino® offers you considerable flexibility in configuring your mail system infrastructure, allowing you to use HCL Notes® routing, SMTP routing, or both, for internal and external messages.

When planning a cluster, it is important to consider the performance and ability of your hardware. The cluster must have enough CPU power, memory, and disk space to handle the cluster traffic and the number of databases and replicas required.

The default TCP/IP configuration for an HCL Domino® server is one IP address that is globally bound, meaning that the server listens for connections at the IP addresses of all NICs on the computer. Global binding works as long as the computer does not have more than one IP address offering a service over the same assigned TCP port.

The HCL Domino® mail system has three basic components: Domino mail servers, Domino mail files, and mail clients. The Domino mail server is the backbone of an organization's messaging infrastructure, acting both as an Internet mail server and an HCL Notes® mail server. Domino provides standards-based Internet messaging through its support of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). At the same time, Domino supports Notes mail through the use of Notes routing protocols -- Notes remote procedure calls (NRPC) -- and the Notes rich text message format.

Use the references listed here to plan for, install, upgrade to, and configure the HCL Notes® client.

An important aspect of planning security for your Domino® environment is understanding the tasks and features involved with securing each type of resource.

This section presents the planning concepts and setup procedures necessary for a successful HCL Domino® deployment over a network. It provides information on network protocols from a Domino perspective but does not attempt to provide general network information.

Topics in this section describe how to set up users and servers.

Setting up security for your organization is a critical task. Your security infrastructure is critical for protecting your organization's IT resources and assets. As an administrator, you need to give careful consideration to your organization's security requirements before you set up any servers or users. Up-front planning pays off later in minimizing the risks of compromised security.

To control user and server access to other servers, Domino® uses the settings you specify on the Security tab in the Server document as well as the rules of validation and authentication. If a server validates and authenticates the Notes® user, Internet user, or server, and the settings in the Server document allow access, the user or server is allowed access to the server.

Every .NSF database has an access control list (ACL) that specifies the level of access that users and servers have to that database. Although the names of access levels are the same for users and servers, those assigned to users determine the tasks that they can perform in a database, while those assigned to servers determine what information within the database the servers can replicate. Only someone with Manager access can create or modify the ACL.

Domino® uses ID files to identify users and to control access to servers. Every Domino server, Notes® certifier, and Notes user must have an ID.

You use an execution control list (ECL) to configure workstation data security. An ECL protects user workstations against active content from unknown or suspect sources, and can be configured to limit the action of any active content that does run on workstations.

You can set up a Domino® certifier that uses the CA process server task to manage and process certificate requests. The CA process runs as a process on Domino servers that are used to issue certificates. When you set up a Notes® or Internet certifier, you link it to the CA process on the server in order to take advantage of CA process activities. Only one instance of the CA process can run on a server; however, the process can be linked to multiple certifiers.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a security protocol that provides communications privacy and authentication for Domino® server tasks that operate over TCP/IP.

Clients can use a Domino® certificate authority (CA) application or a third-party CA to obtain certificates for secure TLS and S/MIME communication.

Encryption protects data from unauthorized access.

Define and set up authentication methods for web users, for example through basic password authentication, passkeys, time-based one-time password, or single sign-on.

The Domino HTTP task can act as an OIDC identity provider. This feature allows administrators to leverage their existing Domino HTTP authentication experience -- including passkeys, TOTP, custom domcfg login forms, and external identity providers -- to authenticate end users with applications, servers, and services that support OIDC.

A Domino® server can use a credential store application as a secure artifact repository. Examples of secure artifacts include authentication credentials and security keys.

Understand the RSA key sizes supported by Notes® and Domino® from past releases to the current release.

The AdminCentral application (admincentral.nsf) is automatically created by adminP on the Domino administration server. You can open AdminCentral directly from your Notes Standard or Nomad web client, without the need to start Domino Administrator. This application provides a simplified and easy-to-use way of managing fully functional Notes users and groups in a Domino deployment.

This documentation provides information about the administration tools for managing and monitoring servers and databases.

Domino® server resource utilization can be separated into two types, system activity and user activity. System activity, which includes the level of processor, disk, memory, and network consumption that Domino generates to keep the server running, is a fixed amount of activity, as long as systems are healthy and performing smoothly. Domino servers typically use a modest percentage of their resources to run. The remaining server capacity is used to support user activity, which varies with the usefulness of the data on the server.

Server.Load is a capacity-planning tool that you use to run tests, also called "scripts" and "workloads," against a targeted Domino® server to measure server capacity and response metrics.

Each time the Domain Indexer task runs, it looks in the Domain Catalog for new databases that have the Include in multi database indexing property enabled. It then looks for documents and files in existing databases and file systems that are new or changed since the last time it ran, and adds them to the Domain Index.

Read the following topics for help on improving basic Domino® server performance and capacity, as well as the performance of these features: Agent Manager, databases and the Domino directory, the directory catalog, LDAP searches, mail, Web server, and UNIX™ server.

After you set up the Domino® Web server and make sure that it runs properly, check the server's performance and response time.

Domino® includes features that improve efficiency in specific environments, but these features may not be switched on by default.

Advanced database properties include performance optimization and compression features, as well as ways to manage usability features such as unread marks and soft deletions.

Three categories of Domino® cluster statistics help you analyze clusters

If the Domino® Administration client workstation performs at 100 percent CPU utilization for a long period of time, the Server Health Monitor discards server statistic data to keep up with the workload.

Troubleshooting is a systematic approach to solving a problem. The goal of troubleshooting is to determine why something does not work as expected and how to resolve the problem.

Use the tell domino support command to collect diagnostic files recently created in the IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT directory into a .zip file.