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Thursday, May 24, 2007

Password management vendors appreciates Microsoft's nod in their direction

Network World

Product Test and Buyer's Guide




Product Test and Buyer's Guide, 05/24/07

By Christine Burns

When Microsoft last week announced it has slipped in a new password policy management measure into Longhorn, vendors playing in the password management space took it as a validation of their own efforts to push more secure, complex passwords for operating system, network and application access alike.

In his story on the subject, Senior Editor John Fontana explained that at Microsoft’s Longhorn Airlift event in Los Angeles, the company demonstrated a new feature in the Longhorn Beta 3 code that will let administrators assign password policies based on users and groups regardless of what domain they reside in. In previous versions of the Microsoft server software you could only set password policy at the domain level.

In the demo, Microsoft showed how an organization can have a reasonably complex password policy for the whole organization. And then use the new tool to tighten the policy for a few key R&D users or some critical executives that would requires more frequent password changes, for example.

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“This addition demonstrates that Microsoft has a heightened awareness for how important it is for users to have complex passwords and to frequently change them for security reasons,” said Peter Schulz, senior manager of technical marketing at Citrix.

He was quick to point out that Microsoft’s new measure only applies to the operating system level and therefore is complementary to what Citrix does at the application level with its own Citrix Password Manager.

“Citrix Password Manager extends password management functionality to third-party applications that the user needs to access, whether they are Windows applications, Web-based applications, or host-based applications,” said Schulz.

Quest Software offers a similar product called Quest Password Manager. A company spokeswoman there said Quest sees Microsoft’s move as a positive development and insisted that its products will integrate with these new features in Longhorn.

Both Citrix Password Manager and Quest Password manager are featured in the Network World Identity Management Buyer’s Guide where they are listed with over two dozen other products that also integrate password management capabilities with single sign-on capabilities and provisioning software. Tap into this Buyer’s Guide to better understand your options in this market space.

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Contact the author:
Christine Burns is the Executive Editor of Testing. She can be reached at cburns@nww.com

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