Password Control

20% of the problems take 80% of your time. It's an old wives' tale perhaps, but it certainly seems plausible when password resets are eating away at the time you need to complete other projects. Organizations that can afford entire IT departments often have help desk personnel to handle password resets. Wisesoft has developed Password Control to help them reset passwords without giving them too many privileges in AD or teaching them how to use the unwieldy AD Users and Computers MMC plugin.

What can this utility do for the Lonely Tech? Read on and see!
This program does exactly what it claims to do and fills a very large need.
My Situation
I work for a public school system. There are less than 1oo employees but hundreds of students with user accounts. I don't have to tell you that people forget their passwords on a daily basis. Because I am working in multiple school buildings throughout town, I am frequently unable to fix password issues at a moment's notice. This occasionally leaves students unable to access a computer in time to use it during a class period. Imagine explaining to your boss that employees or customers couldn't log in because you were "too busy". It's clearly an unacceptable situation.

Password Control
Essentially, Password Control is a simplified front end for resetting passwords in an Active Directory environment. Put some users in a security group with delegated privileges in AD, install this utility for them, and... Voila! Instant help with your password issues. Without a difficult learning curve, you can quickly enlist an army of helpers and turn your attention to more technical issues.

Preparing for Installation
The first thing you need to do is determine who is going to have the privilege of resetting passwords. In our High School, we have one person who helps. In our Intermediate School, I'm moving to give all teachers this utility. Create a group for these people in Active Directory and place them in the group.

You'll need to delegate privileges to this group in order for the users to actually reset passwords. The Wisesoft site has excellent instructions for performing this task. Make sure you read those instructions carefully as you can expose your organization to unnecessary risk by carelessly blundering through.

The purpose of creating the group and delegating rights is to avoid putting your helpers in the Account Operators group. Account Operators will give users the ability to reset passwords -- and a whole lot more. The beauty of Password Control is that it allows people to reset passwords without giving them more power than necessary.

The beauty of Password Control is that it allows people to reset passwords without giving them more power than necessary.
Installation
The install is straightforward. For the record, I have only attempted to install this on XP. I have no idea how Vista will react, let me know if you try.

I had to temporarily elevate users to local admins to get the install to take. If I installed it under my domain admin account, the program only worked for me. After installation, I bumped the user back down to Power User on the local machine. Without Power User status, the user could run the program but received errors once they were in.

The actual install is a matter of taking defaults. I love installs that do that. Click OK several times and then click Finish. To quote Mark Knopfler -- "That ain't working, that's the way you do it."

Use
Using the program is even easier than the install. Type in the user name and the program displays the user's information. This makes it easy to verify you are dealing with the right person. (We wouldn't want to reset Jane Doe's password instead of John Doe's, now would we?) Type in a new password, verify it and hit Enter. Wasn't that easy?

If you aren't sure of the user name, press F3 to search by first and/or last name. If you can't think up a suitable password on your own, press the "G" button to generate a new, random password. If you want the user to change their password on the next log in, there is a checkbox for that. There is even an option for enabling disabled accounts (or disabling enabled accounts).

If you are uncomfortable with giving so many options to your helpers, there is a configuration file where you can disable many of the options (i.e. Enabling accounts).

Conclusion
Password Control has three things going for it:

1. Ease of install
2. Ease of use
3. Price (free!)

Most importantly, this program does exactly what it claims to do and fills a very large need. I highly recommend this program to the Lonely Techs out there.