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Domino authorizes every identity in two layers: a global role that applies across the whole deployment, and permissions on each individual Project, Dataset, Data Source, App, and Compute Environment. You own the first layer and the identity infrastructure behind it. Entity owners grant the second. Sharing and access covers that second layer from a practitioner’s point of view. Federate to the directory you already run. Once it authenticates everyone, the rest of this page is what you do for the cases it does not cover.

Connect an identity provider

Domino runs Keycloak in a pod on your cluster, and every sign-in goes through it. Set Keycloak up first, then add federation on top.
1

Initialize Keycloak

Keycloak is at https://<your-domino-domain>/auth/. Sign in to the administration console at least once to initialize the service. On a fresh installation, enable user registration there if you want people to sign themselves up.
2

Federate to your directory

Connect Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) or Active Directory for user lookup and password verification, which also disables local account creation. Or broker Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) or OpenID Connect (OIDC) single sign-on (SSO) so an external provider performs the authentication challenge and returns a token with the user’s properties.
3

Map roles and organizations from the provider

Add an Attribute Importer mapper named Domino System Roles, with user attribute domino-system-roles, so role synchronization drives Domino roles from your provider. A second mapper, Domino Groups, with user attribute domino-groups, enrolls each user in a Domino organization named after their provider group. That one also needs the configuration key authentication.oidc.externalOrgsEnabled set to true and a restart of Domino services.
4

Limit concurrent sessions

Optional. Cap how many sessions a user holds at once with a Keycloak authentication flow: a browser flow for local or directory authentication, a post-sign in client flow for SSO, and a separate flow to cover API access.
While the Domino System Roles mapper is enabled, domino-system-roles is the only source of a user’s roles. Roles you set on the Admin user management page are overwritten, either the next time that user signs in or, if they are already signed in, within about 5 minutes. Send every role each user needs through the provider instead.
Password requirements and multi-factor authentication for local accounts are configured in Keycloak. Once you broker to an external provider, that provider performs the authentication challenge instead.

Assign global roles

A global role grants capabilities across the whole deployment, independent of any Project. Every user starts with Practitioner, which covers creating Projects, running Jobs, starting Workspaces, and publishing Apps. Roles are additive, so a user holding several gets the union of their permissions. SysAdmin is the full administrative role, and on a new installation the first user to sign in holds both SysAdmin and Practitioner. Assign roles in the Admin application under Users, or map them from your identity provider. SysAdmins can grant any role to any user.
Changing a user’s roles revokes every Personal Access Token they hold. Their scripts, notebooks, and scheduled Jobs stop authenticating until they create replacement tokens, so tell the user before you change their roles.
CloudAdmin appears in the role list as well, but exists only on Domino Cloud. Work with roles has the full permission matrix for every role, including the ones with no administrative reach. To hand a user a narrower Practitioner, enable and assign the Data Analyst role: the same access minus model features, Hardware Tier edits, and Compute Environment management.

Project creation and ownership

No role grants Project creation on its own. Any Practitioner can create a Project, and whoever creates it becomes the Project owner. Ownership carries the authority that matters at the Project level: only the owner can change a Project’s visibility or its name, and only the owner can transfer ownership or archive it from inside the Project. Inviting a collaborator is the owner’s action or a contributor’s, not an administrative one, and Collaborate on Projects has the full permission table. What you control is who holds Practitioner at all, who holds ProjectManager, where ownership lands when someone leaves, and the boundaries owners work inside. These configuration records set those boundaries:
A Public Project exposes its files and run results to anyone with the URL, with no Domino account needed. com.cerebro.domino.defaultProjectVisibility ships as Public, so every Project starts exposed until you change it. Set it to Private. Setting com.cerebro.domino.publicProjects.enabled to false stops Practitioners from choosing Public, but administrators can still create Public Projects, and neither setting changes a Project that already exists.

Provision and deactivate users

Configure email services before you create users; user creation depends on them. Add a user from the Admin application by email address and assign roles at the same time. The user receives a notification and an invitation, and must follow the setup link to finish their profile. Deactivating a user deletes all of their Personal Access Tokens for you, but leaves their Workspaces, executions, and Projects behind, so work through the cleanup in order.
1

Deactivate the account

Find the user under Users in the Admin application and deactivate them. Deactivation is reversible and you reactivate the same way, but the deleted tokens do not come back; the user creates replacements.
2

Stop and delete their Workspaces

Search Reports > Workspaces for Workspaces the user owns, and delete them.
3

Record what has to keep running

Reports > Executions lists the Domino endpoints and Apps the user owns. Note the ones that must stay available.
4

Transfer or archive their Projects

From Reports > Projects, transfer each Project to its new owner or archive it, then restart whatever you recorded in the previous step.
Transferring a Project that contains running Domino endpoints, Apps, or other executions stops those executions until someone restarts them under the new owner. Record what is running before you transfer, and restart it afterward.

Credentials for automation

Give shared automation a Domino Service Account rather than a person’s Personal Access Token. A service account’s tokens belong to no individual, so deactivating a departing employee never breaks a pipeline. Only administrators create service accounts, and only through the Domino API. A service account inherits the roles of whoever created it, so check and adjust them before you issue a token: each token carries the roles the account held at the moment of creation, and later role changes do not reach tokens already issued. Tokens expire after four months by default, and you revoke them individually or by deactivating the account. Personal Access Tokens stay with their owners. The Personal Access Tokens panel lists every token in the deployment with its owner, creation date, last use, and status, and you can revoke or delete any of them, in bulk if you need to. You cannot issue a token for another user, and you cannot read a token value: only its creator can retrieve it, only at the moment of creation.

Audit who has access

When a record of who approved something matters as much as the change itself, require an e-signature on critical actions.
Last modified on August 6, 2026