Terry Gold (CEO/President Gold Sys) has a very realistic (pretty funny) post on "Organisation's password management".

Security experts have long recommended that computer users choose hard-to-break passwords and change them frequently in order to frustrate hackers. Now, those recommendations are being newly forced on millions of U.S. workers in the name of preventing financial fraud under the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-reform act.

Given the need for frequent password changes, there are bound to be more people like Mr.YelloShirt (Read Terry Golds post) who are going to end up forgetting the password and needing to reset it. Password resets have been a pain area for a lot of organisations, costing them a lot of money and with the new rules (internal/enforced) the need has now become critical. Given this background the speech powered password reset option seems to be one that is definitely worth exploring.

Aug 1st Gold Systems announced the availability of Gold Systems' Password Reset(TM). The product securely automates the process of resetting a forgotten or expired password. The first release of the product will run exclusively on the Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) 2004 R2 platform and supports biometric voice verification.

The product is a one-day software installation that supports out-of-the-box password policy management with Active Directory, eDirectory and other LDAP compliant systems. Future plans include support for other leading applications like Peoplesoft, SAP, Oracle, Siebel.