Administering user accounts comes with the IT territory, but constantly dealing with account lockout/password reset issues will eat up your day. This ebook offers five tips for admins and five for end users to help cut down on the volume of requests.

From the ebook:

It happens every day. Every IT professional has experienced it. It’s inescapable. You’re working on a detailed project—something urgent that requires massive amounts of concentration—or you are otherwise trying keep the company ship afloat, and then the request comes in. “My account is locked. Can someone unlock it and reset my password?”

Yes, the dreaded account lockout/password reset request.

You sigh, stop what you’re doing, then take care of the issue, hoping it’s as simple as communicating the new password to the user and that you won’t get dragged into a headache of subsequent account lockouts, problems picking a new password (“It keeps saying my password isn’t sufficiently complex!”), the new password not being accepted on a system, or some other woeful entanglement that can derail your other efforts.

Let’s be clear: IT is there to support the business. A locked or inaccessible account represents a work-stoppage issue. Employees aren’t there to be paid for doing nothing. Passwords are a necessary way of life, and account lockouts occur for security reasons to reduce threats to company data.

On a one-off basis, sorting these problems out isn’t such a big deal, but some days it might seem as if all you’re doing is password resets—and that negatively impacts your workload (not to mention morale).

Biometric solutions are capable of replacing passwords with fingerprint or retinal scanners for hands-on devices, but this pace is not progressing fast enough to satisfy the time management needs of many IT pros. There are better ways to support the organization by advocating technological and strategic approaches. Here are 10 tips to improve account administration among both administrators and end users to reduce lockouts and resets.