ADSelfService Plus was Kadant's first and final choice for password synchronization between Active Directory and Salesforce.

The business challenge—Too many passwords

In today's world, it is almost impossible for organizations to find a single solution that addresses all their business needs. Ironically, while looking for a way to streamline operations, companies often end up deploying multiple narrow-function applications for their end users. While these point products offer easy-to-use features that can help reduce employees' workloads, using multiple applications ultimately makes things more complicated for end users and administrators alike.

The trouble usually begins when users have to remember unique login credentials for each application. This increases the likelihood of users reaching out to IT administrators for things like forgotten passwords and locked out accounts.

Kadant was no exception. With roughly 500 user accounts, Kadant's IT administrators had trouble managing users' password requests for both Active Directory and Salesforce. "Users had to remember two different passwords and we had no easy way to [force] users to change their Salesforce password on a regular basis," said David Leland, IT Salesforce manager.

With a growing number of user accounts, Kadant's IT administrators were desperately looking for a solution that would not only help manage users' passwords to prevent password expirations, but also a password synchronizer that would make management easy. "With over 500 employees making use of Salesforce, and the count expected to increase up to 1,500, we were looking for a solution that would help us synchronize users' Active Directory password with Salesforce," said David.

A two-in-one answer—The ADSelfService Plus advantage

When Kadant started searching for a tool that could sync passwords between Active Directory and Salesforce, it soon found ADSelfService Plus. When asked about choosing a solution, David mentioned that his team was unable to find any other solution that offered the password syncing capability between AD and Salesforce that ADSelfService Plus offered, so there was no competition.

ADSelfService Plus was Kadant's final choice after evaluating a few different SSO solutions, and they surely weren't disappointed. When asked about getting started with ADSelfService Plus, David confirmed that they had no trouble with the straightforward installation and deployment.

The result—A big thumbs up

Creating self-service policies in ADSelfService Plus allowed Kadant's IT team to synchronize passwords for a certain set of users and control users' access to applications, all based on OUs and groups already present in Active Directory. Within a short period of time, Kadant experienced a substantial reduction in the number of password-related help desk calls and is now well on its way towards eliminating these calls using ADSelfService Plus.

After following up with David, he noted that, "[ADSelfService Plus] is working well and has helped simplify things for our users, as they now only have to remember one password—not two. Self-service policy-based access control is very helpful as we roll out password syncing to groups of users. Works great!"

Although ADSelfService Plus is extremely affordable as a password synchronizer, it's also an integrated password management and single sign-on solution. For those reasons, David is looking forward to recommending ADSelfService Plus to other IT administrators. 

“Before we found ADSelfService Plus, we were looking at SSO solutions which [costed] 10 times as much. [ADSelfService Plus] is simple, cost-effective and it’s well worth the money. I will definitely encourage our IT staff supporting AD to utilize other functionalities of ADSelfService Plus,” said David.

About ADSelfService Plus

ADSelfService Plus is an identity security solution to ensure secure and seamless access to enterprise resources and establish a Zero Trust environment. With capabilities such as adaptive multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, self-service password management, a password policy enhancer, remote work enablement and workforce self-service, ADSelfService Plus provides your employees with secure, simple access to the resources they need. ADSelfService Plus helps keep identity-based threats out, fast-tracks application onboarding, improves password security, reduces help desk tickets and empowers remote workforces. For more information about ADSelfService Plus, visit https://www.manageengine.com/products/self-service-password.