Several of the school account administrators have noticed a change to the “User management” screens in the subscription management area. Namely, passwords are no longer listed along with the other personal folder information when you do a search for user folders. This change was made in response to the concerns of some schools over security. Teachers and librarians were printing out the lists of user information, which posed a risk if the printed list was misplaced, and students were using usernames/passwords for NoodleTools that they also used elsewhere.

For this reason, we no longer display the passwords in the results of user searches. If a student loses his password, the account administrator can still look up his folder — but instead of looking up the existing password, the administrator can click the link in the personal ID column. This brings up a screen where the folder information can be edited and the password can simply be reset to something else.

We are considering adding back the passwords for specific subscribers that want that — if you are an account administrator and this is something that you can’t live without, please e-mail us and let us know. Based on the feedback we receive, we may make this change.

1/4/07 update: The ability to view the plain-text passwords (i.e., revert back to the way that user management worked before this change) is now available on a per-subscriber basis. We have turned it back on for the schools and districts that specifically requested it in response to this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Changes & Improvements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.