The Enterprise Random Password Manager from Lieberman Software is a full-featured enterprise identity management system. It comes with some great enterprise features not found anywhere else, as well as all of the other standard identity management software features. We like its ability to create strong, secure passwords for managed accounts and then change them on a regular interval.
ERPM can come in one of several ways. In addition to a standard Windows installer package, it can also come as a virtual appliance for VMware or HyperV. For our tests, we used the software installer. Even though the manual was descriptive, this still took us quite some time to set up. To get started, we set up a virtual machine in VMware and installed Windows Server 2008 R2. ERPM will not run on 32-bit versions of Windows, so keep this in mind when deploying the manager and the website. ERPM requires three parts for setup: The first part is the SQL database. A database is required and both Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases are supported. We used MS SQL Express for simplicity. The second step in the setup was to install IIS, the backend service for the website. We installed that and then configured SSL for enhanced security. After that, we were ready for the third step, which was to start the ERPM installer. We ran it, and once it was done, we launched the ERPM Manager.
On the first launch, we were greeted with an initial setup wizard. We connected it to our database, where it then set the database up automatically. The last step was to configure the website, which was also wizard driven. We used the same machine for all of the product features, but the manager, database and web server should be separate in a production enterprise environment. We performed several tests and were impressed with the product features. We particularly liked its usability as all of its functions are point and click.
The documentation was detailed and walked us through all of the setup. The downside to all of this detail was that the manual was long and took quite some time to read through. There was some repetitiveness and we believe that the manual would benefit from being split up a bit. With that said, the documentation included plenty of screen shots which made it easy to understand. The documentation came in a PDF along with the software installer, also online.
Lieberman Software provides several support offerings. Telephone assistance is included free of charge, Monday through Friday from 2 a.m.-6 p.m. Pacific Time. Email support is included free of charge 24/7. To receive software updates and to expand support hours, a service contract is required. Additionally, 24/7/365 support is available for one year at 20 percent purchase price, two years at 35 percent, and three years for 50 percent of software price.
Overall, ERPM is an excellent choice for large organizations that need a way to centrally manage access to privileged resources. It does this all via an intuitive web application that provides users with everything they need. It is used all over the world by federal agencies and large companies to prevent privileged account abuse.
