Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
A little bit melancholy.
It’s the end of a long-term relationship for me and that is always kind of sad.
You see it’s time for me to move on from one of my favorites.
LastPass, it’s time for me to get a new password manager.
It’s not you.
It’s me.
I feel the need to form a relationship now with 1Password.
I’ll explain to you the reasons a little bit later but if you’re interested in learning
more about password management, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today on
DottoTech.
For the longest time, I have been a proponent of password managers in general and LastPass
specifically.
It is an outstanding password manager but my community, you folks, are interested in
seeing more options that are out there.
Now I’ve got a demo on Dashlane in the past which is another great password manager.
I’ve done lots of stuff on LastPass but never have we looked at 1Password so I really
wanted to spend some time now and show you 1Password.
The thing that really kind of kicked off and got me thinking about doing this was the fact
that LastPass was recently sold.
Now I don’t have any concerns at all about what’s happening with LastPass but it got
me thinking about the relationship that I’ve had and how long how I’ve been using that
one password manager and I recognize the fact that I should see what the rest of the world
is doing as far as password management is concerned.
So it’s time for me to dive into 1Password.
Sorry, LastPass.
As I said, it’s not you.
It’s me.
I hope you can move on without me.
So Agile Bits 1Password, let’s have a quick look at it.
Now it is available on all of the major platforms that you’re going to require your password
manager for, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.
You can indeed have one single they call them vaults where they store all of your passwords
that you can access with all of your different devices so there’s tremendous convenience.
Of course, the whole reason to have a password manager is to make your online life so much
more secure.
You have one master, very cryptic password that gets you into your password management
software and then it manages far more cryptic passwords for each of your accounts, things
that you would never be able to remember yourself, things that are very difficult for anybody
to hack.
That basically provides multiple layers of protection for your account.
Now if you use a password manager, does that mean that you will never lose information
and that it could never be hacked?
I can’t guarantee that.
Nobody can.
The nature of the internet is bad people are out there constantly trying to steal information
so there’s every likelihood that at some point, one of these password managers might
fail or people using them might still have their information compromised.
But you’re really reducing the likelihood of that happening by using one of these tools.
They also add a tremendous level of convenience as well if you use them properly, the way
that they’re designed.
Once you download and install 1Password, you will ultimately have access to it in three
primary places.
First of all, you can launch the application itself which is an app that runs on your computer.
Here it is.
I’ve launched it.
Now really what it is, it’s a database.
It’s going to marry the websites’ addresses to usernames and passwords altogether for
us in the password management area.
There are other data types that it’s going to store such as credit card information or
your passport number and those sorts of things but for our purposes today, we’re just going
to be talking about the password tools.
So in the application itself, we can control and we can work with all of our different
password for our accounts.
Now the one thing that I do want to take you into is the Preferences menu here which does
a variety of different things, setting levels of security, etc. but the most important thing
here is determining where you’re going to store your vault.
Now the vault is an important term in the world of 1Password because the vault is basically
a collection of passwords and usernames.
Now you can have multiple vaults if you choose.
“Why would you want multiple vaults?”
you may ask.
I will tell you why.
Supposing you want one for personal life and one for business life.
The business one, you might want to share your colleagues and co-workers and the personal
one, you might want to share with family members.
Ahh, in that particular case storing these vaults on a cloud service like Dropbox would
be ideal because then when we change preferences, when we change account information, people
who we share these files with would have access to the updated information.
Of course, what we’re doing here is compromising the security of our security system slightly
by allowing other people access but that’s the nature.
There’s a give and take constantly as we go through the process of providing security.
We have to weigh convenience versus security and no system is going to be 100% secure and
no system is going to be 100% convenient so there’s always going to be a balancing act.
This is how 1Password manages that balancing act.
Now the second place, once you’ve installed the software, is it will also install kind
of a little applet that in this particular case it’s running here in my menu bar on
the Mac and I can access all of the different 1Password features from here.
This is especially useful when we’re not dealing with web things but instead when we’re
dealing with things like credit card information and that sort of stuff, although I can quickly
here access any of my websites from this menu.
Here I shouldn’t say that it’s not as useful for the web.
This is a very quick way for us to jump ahead and to go to any account quickly and easily.
You can see I’ve got lots of accounts here and I’m still cleaning up because I had
lots of all sorts of kind of temporary passwords and that kind of stuff in LastPass when I
migrated all of my information over.
Oh, I didn’t mention that to you, did I?
I was able to migrate all of my passwords and usernames from LastPass directly into
1Password, which saved me an inordinate amount of time.
Now I have to apologize.
The screen is this demo is going to be blurred to a certain extent for the entire demo just
because I’m dealing with my real account here and for me to go through and find each
and every different thing that I might need to blur out I feel would be difficult for
me so you’re just going to be able to see general ideas of how the software works instead
of being able to read the actual menu items because these are my accounts.
Once again, I’m sorry about that but this is the easiest way for me to put it together.
So now you’ve got those two places.
You’ve got the application itself and we’ve got the little applet running in the menu
bar.
The other place where you’re going to be using 1Password is in your browser and you’re
going to want to install it in all of your browsers.
You do that as a browser extension.
We’ve shown you many, many times how to install browser extensions but in this particular
case here—I’m in Chrome—you simply go into the Chrome Preferences and within there,
you have an area for extensions.
There you can scroll down to the very bottom.
You can search in the Chrome Store for the 1Password extension and then you can install
it.
Once you’ve installed it, you’ll log in and it will appear as a menu item here within
your browser window, within the top of your browser.
You can see I still have LastPass actually running and active and here is 1Password also
running and active.
So you can actually have multiple password managers running if you choose to.
I don’t recommend it.
I don’t think it’s very healthy to do long-term and I’m not planning on doing
it for too long a time but for now I’ve got them both running at the same time.
Then it’s a simple process.
You go to a website so let’s go to Google and let’s say that we want to sign in to
a different account than the one we’re actually signed into.
So we’re going to Add an account and at that point there where we go to add a new
account or to go to any account, what would happen with LastPass is LastPass would find
the fields in whatever log-in you have and it will give you a little badge within it
telling you that you could click on that and then you could choose which account you want
to log in with, especially with something like Google you might have multiple accounts,
it would give me multiple accounts when I’d click here.
That’s the LastPass interaction we see happening here.
1Password doesn’t work within the actual browser window.
Instead, it relies in the menu bar and allows us to choose.
It brings up all of the different options for logging in here in the pop-down menu.
There are two other features that I want to show you here within this Dropdown menu.
One of them is the Favorites menu which allows you to save your most common different accounts
that you’re going to want to log into so you don’t have to look your entire list.
That’s very helpful and you can see I’m just starting to set it up with my favorite
ones.
But the other is the password generator which allows us to create very powerful cryptic
passwords for all of our accounts.
So this is very useful when you’re creating a new account but it’s also a good idea
to go into your existing accounts and upgrade the passwords, especially those accounts that
you’ve built over the years where you’re using that same password, the one that was
your old master password over and over again.
It’s a great idea to go through and do some spring cleaning.
Just maybe every day go through ten accounts.
Go through and upgrade your password for ten accounts and within a very short period of
time, you will increase your level of security substantially.
My first week or so using 1Password, do I think it’s better than LastPass?
No, not really.
It’s different than LastPass.
I like a lot of things about it.
I’m getting used to the way it works and it’s becoming very second nature to me.
I like how clean the interface is and in some ways, I think it’s a little bit less confusing
managing your passwords than it was in LastPass but effectively it seems to be doing pretty
much the same job.
It’s a great option for you to have a look at and we will definitely take a look at it
a little bit more in the future.
But for now, that gives you a beginning overview of 1Password.
I hope that you found today’s video to be useful.
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Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.