Thank you very much! You guys did a great job helping me out!
Have you ever said this to your administrators? I have done that frequently. Actually I did one hour ago.
We are hosting some of our email accounts on a cloud company managed by our administrators. Since these accounts are not used regularly, I forgot the password of that email long time ago. But out of the blue, one of our customers sent his support requesting email to that account.
No matter how reluctant I am to ask our administrators to reset my password, I have to brace myself to ask for their help. They are good folks, but asking them to do such thing is not comfortable for me.
This is my story of asking our administrators to reset password. And I am sure that this kind of story is very common in different organizations. On Reddit, one of my favorite web sites, there is a post entitled “FUCK PASSWORD”. Based on its popularity, it is safe to say that a vast majority of us are tormented by passwords. Setting a new one, changing or unlocking it are time consuming chores.
That being said, passwords are insanely important and ubiquitous. As a security tool, passwords are fundamental for SharePoint. Actually, without it one may not go into SharePoint. It is common that we may not start our work because of our password. Password is important, but if we cannot start our work because of it, it becomes ridiculous and counterproductive. Yet, due to its significance, we cannot take it lightly, for example assigning ordinary users to manage passwords.
This predicament is not hard to solve though. Given the many SharePoint vendors around the world, there must definitely be some web parts designed for this. Among them, BoostSolutions introduced SharePoint Password Reset almost year ago, which works with both SharePoint 2007 and 2010.
SharePoint Password Reset, as its name goes, is designed to let end users unlock their password, should they be expired or, like in my case, forgotten. SharePoint Password Reset provides two ways to achieve this without bothering administrators. The first one is through email and the other is through answering a security question.
When your password is locked, you can go to a SharePoint page, and on that page you can see an email box. Through this email box you can input your email, to which a link will be sent. Using this link, you shall see your new password.
In addition to that, you can also reset your password by answering a security question. The question should be set by administrators and you can choose your security answer. By providing the right answer, you can unlock your password.
By now, you may know that this sort of password resetting functionality is quite common on popular emails services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail or web sites like Facebook. Using SharePoint Password Reset to unlock your SharePoint password is no different than what you need to do when you forget your password for those websites. Our product team should be proud of making SharePoint passwords resetting so easy.
Unlocking password usually recreates mind numbing passwords. As secure as it may, it is very hard to remember. Here comes the SharePoint Password Change & Expiration web part, this web part is complementary to SharePoint Password Reset. SharePoint Password Change & Expiration web part enables users to change their own password without the intervention of administrators, moreover it sends reminder emails to users should their password reach expiration date.
SharePoint Password Change & Expiration web part and Password Reset web part address a basic SharePoint security issue: SharePoint security accounts have no password changing procedure implemented. You must ask SharePoint administrators to change the password manually.
With those two password tools, unlocking, changing or reminding password will not be an issue anymore.