Business Productivity

New: Password expiration notification in Alexa for Business

If you’re an administrator, you know that you must periodically rotate passwords for security purposes. Forgetting passwords can be frustrating and sometimes disrupt service.

AWS has paid close attention to customer feedback about this issue. Based on what you’ve told us, we added a password expiration notification for Microsoft Exchange service accounts linked to Alexa for Business.

Alexa for Business sends you email reminders in increments of 14 days, 7 days, 3 days, and 1 day before passwords expire. After a password expires, email notifications are sent daily to the AWS account owner’s email, and to the operations alias if one is set on the AWS account.

Here is an example of an email notification. The notification provides information about what you must do to prevent service interruption and provides a link to where you can update your password. In this case, the notification was sent 14 days before the password expired:

Managing alerts and passwords

The service account password expiration alerts are also available in the AWS Personal Health Dashboard.

To view alerts

  1. Open the AWS Management Console.
  2. On the navigation bar, choose Alerts, Other Notifications.
  3. On the dashboard, under Other notifications that relate to your AWS account, choose a calendar password expiration event to view.

To change the service account password

  1. Open the Alexa for Business Console.
  2. Choose Calendars.
  3. In the Calendar link section, choose the Microsoft Exchange account that is linked.
  4. Choose Edit, and type a new password.

Best practices 

To avoid service disruption, we recommend creating multiple Microsoft Exchange service accounts for the Alexa for Business console. By doing so, you can keep the service running on one account in case you miss replacing the password on another account. By replacing the service account completely, you can ensure that the time difference between replacing the password and entering it into the console would be minimized completely.

Summary

This feature requires no action to enable. All customers using Microsoft Exchange get this functionality for free. To get started with managing expiring service account passwords, see Set up Microsoft Exchange Access for Users in the Alexa for Business Administration Guide.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us in the AWS Forums or through AWS Support.