Solo Technology

Based on the number of recent mentions, I suspect I’ve established that I am a recent and enthusiastic convert to the eWallet password management application. I have it on my laptop and my Windows Mobile phone and just love it. Easy to use, easy to sync and it just works.

I recently mentioned that they also have a beta Web Companion and was fortunate enough to be accepted as a beta tester. (Big thanks to Iliumsoft’s Marc and Julie for the offers to test)

Being wise in the way of beta testing, I did not use my real password file for this first look. My initial concern was that my welcome letter to the beta assigned a password and noted that there wasn’t currently a way to change it. Yikes!

Well, I finally got around to trying it out this morning and I’m pleased to note that the password now can be changed.

Security Notes

Some quick quotes on security:

[...] all of your information is stored using eWallet’s 256-bit AES FIPS encryption, so eWallet’s strong encryption continues to keep your information secure

and

[...] all information is transferred using the https protocol. This is the same encrypted transfer method used by your bank, credit card company, and online stores to transfer personal information and account numbers over the internet. This means that your personal information remains extremely safe at all times.

Also, as mentioned above, you can manage your own password for access. This is not the same as the password on the actual wallet file (nor, I propose, should it be!).

Like anything that involves the words “online” and “security”, I leave it to you to determine where your trust lies and how much you extend.

Usability

The web site is dead simple to use. To test, I created a new wallet with some dummy info and then used the desktop client’s sync ability to FTP it up to their provided storage area (note: you can store multiple wallets online).

I then pointed my browser to https://ewallet.iliumsoft.com/ and logged in with my beta user ID and password.

At that point I was presented with a screen to select my wallet and provide its password to open it. If you have multiple wallets stored online, this is where you choose which one you want to open. You can also upload a new or updated wallet from here as well.

See the “Settings” tab in that screen shot? That’s where I can change my password.

Once the wallet is open, a tree view of the contents is presented on the left. Whatever gets clicked on is presented on the right. Very straightforward and intuitive.

Note: This is all currently read-only. Hopefully at some point down the road it’ll be read/write, but for now it isn’t. Or maybe that should be a value-add fee?

Mobile

Mobile access to all this from my WinMo 6 phone was very similar as from the desktop. The only main difference I saw was that when opening a wallet I had a choice to show the information as a tree view (the default when browsing from desktop) or grid view.

In other words, the mobile experience is almost identical to the desktop access but with some options to help with usability.

Conclusion

I like it. The Web access really extends the use of the eWallet desktop or mobile client by allowing the user to access their data from machines that aren’t necessarily running the purchased software. In fact, even if the web side is always just read-only I’d still say it is a win. Depending on how they treat and price this after the beta program, it might even save me some money.

Now, I only hit what I imagine are the main use case scenarios and didn’t try any “edge case” stuff. For instance, I have no idea how it handles retrieving documents that were stored in a wallet. But for what I’d anticipate is 99% of most uses, it works great!

With the (new) ability to change password, I’m seriously considering uploading my real wallet to the service. Being able to quickly browse to it from any server/machine that I might be on is an enticing proposition!

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