Web Merchant Resource Center

If you run a small business with any Internet interaction, I’m sure you have experienced fatigue with too many logins to remember. User name and password combinations abound: a login for your domain registrar, a login for your hosting control panel, another for your online banking. There just seems to be no end of logins to remember.

There are many ways we all cope with this issue. Some will just let our browser remember our passwords for us, but run into a variety of issues with that approach along with that nagging feeling that this might not be the most secure way to manage logins. Others will keep spreadsheets on logins, but still this too is inconvenient at best. And yes, some might admit to keeping logins on a sheet of paper for reference.

Another common approach against login fatigue is to work with a set of standard logins ranging from less to most secure depending on the nature of the application or service we are logging into. For example, we might use a relatively simple password for logging in to comment on blogs, a more secure password for logging into places we do business with that don’t retain any sensitive information about us, an even stronger password for logins that have to do with our business such as our hosting control panel for our web site, etc., and a very strong password for anything that has to do with our finances such as our online banking.

This approach has the advantage of keeping a wide array of logins rather simply limited to a small set of options assigned by the level of security desired; however, this strategy breaks down pretty quickly when confronted with logins that require rules for setting passwords that weren’t part of the way we created these security-tiered logins – or worse yet, when confronted with high security services which force a change of password periodically.

And of course, when we can’t quite get the login correct, we resort to stumbling through the “forgot password” and or “forgot username” functionality, if provided.

Some among us have discovered tools along the way that facilitate keeping track of all of these logins. There have been many available for almost as long as here have been browsers to surf the web. For example, back in 1997 I started with a little application called Gator. It was a free password manager. I really liked for a very long time. However, it was technically “spyware” as the cost of the free application was to report back certain aspects of my online activity. I honestly didn’t mind that, but eventually antivirus software started having fits about this “spyware” on my machine, so I decided to remove it for that reason alone.

This forced me to find a new solution as I have scores of logins to manage, and none of the approaches I mentioned above would suffice. I spent a couple of days of reviewing several such as SurfSecret KeyPad, TurboPasswords, and Password Manager XP. You can find a view of several at www.TopTenReviews.com; just search the site for “password management”.

I settled on RoboForm (www.roboform.com). It is free if you only need up to manage up to 30 logins; after that it requires a license for a nominal fee.

Once installed, it’s a login management dream come true. One of the handiest of its features is the ability to organize your logins rather like you would organize your “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” in your browser by creating folders and names for the various places you log into. And then the real convenience power of RoboForm kicks in as this saved location then becomes a “one click” login. For example, I have a location for my online banking. Rather than going to my browser’s Bookmarks, I can go in through RoboForm and click on that location. It will then take me there and log me in — all in one click.

RoboForm is also very user-friendly in that it allows you to edit and see what your passwords actually are for your logins. That is, rather than showing you a bunch of starred-out characters, you will see the actual password.

What’s more, it automatically plugs into both your Internet Explorer and FireFox browsers at the same time. So, if you establish a login on one browser, it will be there for you in the other.

There is just one catch – there is ONE password you will have to remember: the password to your login RoboForm vault.

There are many other amazing features of RoboForm this article doesn’t afford space for, but I encourage you to have a look at it and try it out if you are experiencing login fatigue. Download it and set up your “one click login” to your profile on the Redwood Technology Consortium’s website: www. redwoodtech.org

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 7:28 pm and is filed under General Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.