1Password launches public beta for teams

Agilebits, makers of 1Password, recommends robust password selection and protection. Thus, it stuck in its craw, says Jeff Shiner, the company’s chief, that its business users had no simple and secure way to share collectively used passwords or secrets to which one user might need to grant access to others on occasion or when unavailable. 1Password for Teams is a result of chewing on that problem and talking to its existing customers. It’s been quietly in the works for nearly two years, and entered a public beta on Tuesday.

Unlike the sort-of competing LastPass Enterprise, which is an integrated enterprise-scale product designed to integrate with existing corporate directory systems and act as a drop-in solution for shared password management, 1Password is more precisely a maturation and substantial extension of the desktop and mobile software already in place. In fact, those apps will be updated to work with the new subscription-based service without any outward change to individual users. (Shiner says Teams code has been quietly hidden in native client releases for a long time.)