Coming Soon: The Death of Passwords?

Contemporary businesses of all sizes generate billions in revenue online. Formerly isolated offices are being linked across continents. Customers are coming in through laptops at Starbucks. For each new web tool and service your team offers to customers and associates, you must strike a balance between accessibility and security. Knowledge sharing giant Wikipedia lets anyone contribute without logging in.

By eliminating barriers to entry for first-time users you can get people interested; the option to offer advanced features to power users after registration never goes away. Despite the popularity of Wikipedia, some systems cannot function without secure logins. Public access is simply unwelcome in most companies’ financial files and strategic plans, and so most of the applications we use online require user names and passwords.

Your Password Isn’t Good Enough
Password requirements range from a few letters to a long string of gibberish that must be written down to be remembered. My corporate intranet has a mandatory 90-day password change and passwords must include a number and a non-alphanumeric character. It’s a pain, but our LAN team has the right idea: an 8 character password is not all that secure when your users are using the same password at 500 free web sites that can be easily linked back to your protected network.

Once your OpenID is validated between Plaxo and Blogspot (or any other two OpenID-compliant sites) then you can create a new account sans password or possibly not even need to create an account at all. Finally you can create throwaway accounts at new sites without juggling unique passwords, reusing one weak password, or many other password annoyances.

How Passwordless Logins Help Your Business
Applications have a better chance to succeed when there is a low barrier to entry. The less signup work and introductory training required to use a site, the more users are willing to try it. This is an especially important facet of a knowledge sharing program: You want as many people as possible joining in to your organization’s knowledge sharing network in order to maximize its effectiveness.

3Com founder Bob Metcalfe claims that each additional contributor to a network is worth significantly more than the previous contributor. Imagine how much more effective your operations could be if the rest of your team started sharing their expertise online! Make it as easy and productive for them as possible.