IT System Improvement for Password Handling

Personal data of employees, unique processes, information about the market and partners — this information is of great value to any company and should be protected. A significant proportion of leaks in organizations are associated with improper storage of access credentials. To protect account passwords, companies can use a range of IT solutions — password managers.

SimbirSoft's portfolio includes dozens of IT system improvement projects. This new case study tells how we strengthened the Passwork service team.

Customer

Passwork is a manager of corporate passwords. Its task is to collect in one place, structure and secure passwords used by employees of a company. Among the main advantages of the service is the customized configuration of password access levels and the option to invite colleagues to teams. Passwork's customers are the largest Russian banks, IT and telecom companies, industrial enterprises and start-ups.

Task

The customer chose us to finalize the product installation program (installer). We were expected to automate it, as well as to facilitate its installation and update on Windows Server.

Our tasks were:

solving the problem of updating the product without re-releasing a new version of the installer each time;
adding the option to install the product both offline and online;
developing a mechanism to migrate users who previously installed the product manually.

3 months

of development

4 specialists

in the team

Solution

The customer's product installer is a non-standard application with a custom interface and functionality. Installation, migration and update modes include many steps to configure access rights, install the necessary applications and components, create tasks and backups, as well as migrate data of the previous app version.

After determining the product requirements, we came up with a detailed work plan, which included:

exploring the installer's current code base;
redesigning the PHP installer;
implementing the option to upload a new version of the Passwork website in the archive through the Customer's API;
developing an online/offline installation and update mode;
automatic SSL configuration;
automatic deployment of the Passwork website with MongoDB and PHP installation;
adding a custom GUI;
mechanism for generating certificates and installing the website/certificates;
adding ‌migration mode;
adding backup copies of the website and its database;
project rebranding (updating the page design).

Result

We improved the installer according to the requirements and added the functionality the Customer needed. We offered several solutions for some tasks to mitigate the risk of errors. We ensured thorough testing and debugging of each mode of the installer. Testing was also conducted on different operating systems and configurations.

In addition, we offered a number of UX improvements: field autocompletion, opening the necessary folders and other elements to simplify interaction with the product.

4 people in the team: 2 backend-developers, 1 QA, 1 PM