[Casper] Entourage Saved Passwords

[Smith, William]

On 2/24/09 2:30 PM, "Bruce Stewart" <bstewart at brocku.ca> wrote:

> Entourage stores its passwords in the OS X Keychain. If you tell Entourage to
> save a password and then open your Keychain (go to Applications/Utilities and
> open Keychain Access), you will see a category on the left panel called
> ³Passwords². Under this is Applications where the passwords for applications
> are stored.

[snip]
 
> I do not like users storing passwords on systems. They tend to forget them if
> they do not type them in for months. We do thousands of password resets a year
> for users; mostly because they do not type it in until the next time it
> expires and they have to get it reset. Catch 22, can't set a new password
> unless you know your old one.

You¹re correct that scripting passwords in Entourage is not possible.

If administrators want to take a sledgehammer approach then they can create
a logout policy that deletes:

    ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

I'd weigh the costs and benefits of not allowing passwords to be stored for
all users vs. Help Desk calls to reset passwords. While I hate the Mac OS X
Keychain myself, it is useful to the end users. Whose inconvenience weighs
more?

-- 

bill

William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
MCS IT
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492