The ‘Private Folders’ add-on from Microsoft has recently been removed from their web pages.
At Office Watch we take a cautious approach to new products, rather than jumping on the latest big thing we tend to hold back and see what happens. In other words, we let other people be the guinea pigs.
That caution (for ourselves and our readers) was fully justified with the release of the ‘Private Folders’ free add-on from Microsoft. This was a curious beast from the get-go and finally Microsoft pulled it from their web pages.
The idea was that you could create ‘Private Folder’ on your computer where any files would be encrypted and locked with a password. Sounds interesting, especially for people who share their computer with others.
In practice it wasn’t such a great idea. While the utility encouraged you to use a strong password, there seemed no way to change it after it was initially set.
There was no way to recover the data if you lost that password. While that is a good security feature in theory, in practice people forget passwords and need a fallback option. The add-in also used a high proportion of system resources – slowing down everything else on the computer.
All in all, not the best release we’ve ever seen from Microsoft. It’s good that it was pulled but we’re still wondering why the utility was made public at all? There were enough people inside the company warning about the shortcomings in ‘My Private Folder’ but those voices were ignored.
