Setting Salesforce Users' Passwords with Workbench

One request that I'm sure many admins get is "Can you set my password to {insert pet's name here}?". For a long time, the standard answer was always "Unfortunately I can only reset your password". The ability to set a user's password was available, but for a lot of admins is required tools and skills that were more in the realm of the developer. Enter:

"Workbench is a powerful, web-based suite of tools designed for administrators and developers to interact with Salesforce.com organizations via the Force.com APIs. Workbench includes robust support for the Force.com Partner, Bulk, Rest, Streaming, Metadata, and Apex APIs that allows users to describe, query, manipulate, and migrate both data and metadata in Salesforce.com organizations directly in their web browser with a simple and intuitive user interface. Workbench also provides many advanced features for testing and troubleshooting the Force.com APIs, such as customizable SOAP headers, debug logs for API traffic, backward compatibility testing with previous API versions, and single sign-on integration within the Salesforce application."

With access to Workbench, all admins now have the ability to set a user's password to a predetermined value. Keep in mind that just because you now have the ability to do this, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's permitted by your company's security/compliance policy. Nonetheless, that's a different discussion for another time. For this post, we'll focus on the "Can" and the "How", not the "Shouldn't".

The process is very simple. Go to the Workbench site at https://workbench.developerforce.com/login.php and login using your SFDC credentials.

Click on the Utilities menu option and select Password Management.

Enter the user id of the user account you want to set the password for. Then enter and confirm the new password. Click the "Change Password" button and you're set.

Workbench is a great tool and should be part of every admin's toolbelt. Explore all the features and see all the useful things it can help you do. Read more about Workbench here: Developerforce Workbench