Most organisations force users to change their network passwords at set intervals, often every 30, 60 or 90 days. In today’s complex environments the password change process can be a difficult experience for users, and can also be a high overhead for support teams.

Perhaps there is a case that can now be made for encouraging users to set more complex passwords, whilst permitting them to keep the same password for longer?

I’m not completely convinced as the study seems to focus mostly on brute force type cracking, as well as on guessing techniques for passwords which have transformed in small ways during the expiration and change process (for example a user changing their password from Password1234 to Password12345). One big area of concern would still be malware infections and associated keylogging programs which could potentially offer an intruder keys to the target account for a prolonged period of time.

Nevertheless it is an interesting concept, and may well feed arguments against very high frequency expiry, as the inconvenience to users and loss of their productivity may well not be worthwhile.

Study originally from University of North Carolina, via cio.com.au

Firstly, it would open their eyes to what users are actually going though – there is nothing like receiving first hand feedback.

Secondly, senior IT staff should have good visibility over the IT department as a whole and my bet is that problems would get nipped in the bud sooner. It would also most likely lead to some innovative ideas for improving service.

Thirdly, end users may actually appreciate having access to experienced senior staff who have the authority to make a difference.

Of course plenty of senior IT managers won’t like the sound of this at all

Microsoft have done a good enough job of making it ‘look’ facebook-like, and it turns some heads when demoed on Powerpoint slides at sales events. As soon as you start to use it however, you begin to see its major shortfalls.

Yes you can find and follow colleagues and yes you can submit facebook-like status updates, but that’s really where the good stuff ends. No ability to reply to comments, to answer a question, or even to ‘like’ an existing comment. These are huge discussion killers that for me render the system almost useless as a proper social tool. Yes it does have some other redeeming features, but the reality is that as soon as users see the interface, they expect to able interact with their colleagues and to hold discussions, and the fact is that they cannot.

I have read that Microsoft had planned to incorporate full microblogging functionality into this release but ran out of time, hence the semi-functional mess we have ended up with. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, I am however pretty confident that the next release will have a much greater real time social discussion emphasis.

The next release of course is still a couple of years away at this stage.. so what do we do in the mean time?

I have done some interesting work with Newsgator Social Sites for Sharepoint. This product, while far from being perfect, certainly does fill in a lot of gaps. It does turn MySites into a truly social networking system for your business, and provides the benifit of doing this within the sharepoint ecosystem (meaning so you still get other benefits like native AD integration, native Communicator/Lync integration etc).

Its just a pity that we need to purchase a third party application for this purpose, which comes with its own overheads in terms of licencing, SQl database maintenance, disaster recovery planning etc.

Take the below steps to turn on the publishing infrastructure (although of course you should have a good understanding of what this entails before you do it in a production environment):

1) Activate Sharepoint Server Publishing Infrastructure at the site collection level.

• Go to the top level site in your site collection.
• Open Site Settings.
• Under Site Collection Administration, click ‘Site Collection Features’.
• Make sure that Sharepoint Server Publishing Infrastructure is activated.

2) Activate Sharepoint Server Publishing on the site you wish to change the masterpage.

• Open Site Settings for the site in question.
• Under Site Actions, choose Manage Site Features.
• Make sure that Sharepoint Server Publishing is activated.

You should now see the Masterpage option under ‘Look and Feel’.