Random rambling about technology, BlackBerry, Lotus Domino, accents and the pursuit of happiness.


View Darren Duke's profile on LinkedIn
 

alt


Darren Duke is co-founder and technical lead with Simplified Technology Solutions, Inc.

Why not join the growing hordes of satisfied Lotus, BlackBerry and VMware customers and hire me!

New customers ARE NEVER disappointed. No crisis is too big, no issue is too small. Take a look at the latest latest customer satisfaction survey and see what we mean.

 
Admin

Darren Duke Blog Zone

Lotus Notes password change dialog

Darren Duke  October 28 2008 08:13:00 AM
I'm in the midst of R8 conversion from Exchange (via a client M&A). Why when I force out a policy to change passwords does the dialog have to be so "wordy" and difficult to understand?

Image:Lotus Notes password change dialog

It is very hard for a user to discern that they need a 6 char long, 1 number, 1 special char password to be able to leave this box. It would be nice if the dialog only showed what was set in the policy to avoid confusing new users.
Comments

1Dave Quinlan  10/28/2008 10:49:09 AM  It gets worse

because not all "special characters" are special enough for Notes 8, we found that one out the hard way. $ (for example) is invalid.

2Mary Beth Raven  10/28/2008 9:47:07 PM  no, it can be short if your password rules are easy!

Hi,

this borrible dialog is really determined by YOU. If your password rules are easy, you can change this dialog-- yes, the dialog is customizable. You could also delete all the things which are "not applicable". (yeah, then you would have to renumber, but you CARE about your users, right?)

With power and felxibility comes responsibility :)

3Hynek Kobelka  10/29/2008 9:25:29 AM  Room for improvement

Hi Mary-Beth,

yes the content of the dialog can be customized, but nevertheless there is so much room for improvement.

Many applications today use a simple graphical way which shows if the password meets the specific criteria. And these graphical indicators change with every new character the users enters. (They turn green from red for example).

And don't even allow the user to hit "OK" if the password does not meet the criteria. A message afterwards is not as nice.

And I have to add that we really need the "Change password" button in the main menu and not buried inside the ID-file dialog.

And it should also be on EVERY dialog which tells you that the password will or has expired.

And ...

Sorry for repeating this again and again. I am sure that you know about it. But I still believe that someday it will come.

Have a nice day :-)

4Darren Duke  10/30/2008 9:21:02 AM  Lotus Notes password change dialog

Mary Beth, any pointers on where this is documented? I do kind of agree that some signifiers as to matching the complexity requirements would be nice. You have to remember that we are starting to move a lot of folks FROM Exchange. We need to make this as familiar as possible.

5Shean McManus  11/11/2008 11:15:45 AM  Customizing the ’Change Password’ dialog

Any response from Mary Beth on the documentation on how to customize the "change password" dialog? I'm willing to do this to remove the rules that are not applicable to our organization but cannot find information anywhere on how to do this.