Runtime Solution Password Recovery Options..?

[angelleye]

I've got a FM solution that I distribute as a runtime. I have 2 accounts included with the runtime: admin and user. Our users use the user account, and the first time they sign in it has them set their own password. This all works fine.

People forget their passwords, though, and the only answer I've had for them is to uninstall and re-install the software. Obviously, this is not ideal.

I'm looking into this a little more now and I see there is a script step for resetting an account password. This looks nice, but we'd still have to be signed in to some other account in order to get access to the script, right? We could at least do a screen share with the person, log in as our admin user, and then reset it for them, but we can't guarantee 24x7 support, so that's not ideal either.

Is there some other method I could use to make this work nicely for everybody involved?

I was thinking it would be nice to hook the user account system up to the user's local computer instead of using the built in FM accounts. That way they could manage all their usernames and passwords on their operating system, and those would then work to sign in to FM. I'm not finding any information about anything like that, though.

Any information on how I could handle this in a nice way would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Wim Decorte]

The FM feature you're looking for to do this is called "External Authentication". Do a search on that and you'll find plenty of info.

[dsghs]

IIRC, You do not need admin privileges to run the change password script steps. You only need to be logged in as the user whose password is being changed and have access to run the script. You can accomplish this with custom dialog boxes asking for old pass, new pass, new confirm pass.

[Vaughan]

External authentication requires FM Server: the OP has a runtime.

[IdealData]

If you enable the Guest user, then no password required there, so you could use this as a method of initialising or changing the password for 'user'.

I'm presuming you have a startup script so you could detect the Guest mode and run scripts accordingly. Running your scripts with full access privileges will overcome the Guest mode limitations.

In fact you could have another user account that has no password, but of course let your scripting take control and force the user to supply a password for the 'user' account.

Now, if your user forgets their password then their retrieval method is to do a password reset, via the 'Guest' account.