IT organizations on the Microsoft platform use .NET’s ability to use both Active Directory integrated authentication as well as authentication with usernames and passwords stored on the local machine to secure their websites and web applications.

Password management becomes a big problem whether the accounts are coming from an Active Directory server on the domain or from the local server on which the application is running.  When user’s passwords start to expire in the normal course of business (a must in today’s hack-happy world) and frustrated users no longer have access to their web information organizations can’t afford to field hundreds of calls to helpdesk in a week.  IT professionals also don’t particularly enjoy that kind of work as it’s extremely repetitive and not particularly challenging.  IT managers don’t enjoy the human cost of fielding such calls.

If you’re at least vaguely familiar with Web Active Directory’s IISADMPWD Replacement piece of our Active Directory Identify Management Platform, you might know that it provides IT professionals an easy way to set their users up to change their passwords in a web application if they need changing.  What you may not know, however, is that it also works tightly with your websites or web applications to provide users a seamless experience when accessing their applications.  Website password protection is easy with our solution.

What does this mean?

When a user hits your website or web application, if they are authenticated successfully (either through your ActiveDirectory domain or via the local account/password store on your server), that’s great, they are in.
When a user hits your website or web application and their password on the ActiveDirectory server or local machine has expired and needs changing, they are gracefully redirected to a page where they can change their password (according to complexity rules that you set up within the administrative part of IISADMPWD Replacement) then upon a successful change are re-directed back to your application where they can go about their business happily.

The diagram below illustrates this workflow:

IISADMPWD Replacement is not only a great way to allow users to change their passwords securely over the web in a self-service fashion, but it also works tightly in conjunction with your website and web application security to give users a good application experience and spare you from having to field calls from your them when they lose access to those applications.  Website password protection with a self-service password change tool is easy.