CryptCard lessons learned

One concern we have with Global Technologies Group Inc.'s CryptCard is the uneven documentation.

Administrators, for example, can assign an "uninstall" capability to a CryptCard so users can take it off a system. Of course, most users should not have that right, so we did not assign it to our first CryptCard, resulting in much confusion. It was only when we were ready to uninstall the CryptCard that we discovered we had to program an additional card with uninstall rights.

If the instructions had been complete, this would not have been a problem. Unfortunately, the manual omits several key pieces of information about this process. The first is that the new card must be programmed exactly the same way as the original card, with the only difference being the inclusion of the uninstall capability. Our first additional card was not programmed the same way, so it did not work.

Another lesson we learned the hard way is that once the first CryptCard, called the installation card, has been programmed for a user, any additional cards for that user must be programmed as spare cards instead of installation cards. For our second attempt, we reprogrammed our original installation card, which meant that the keys were lost and the card no longer functioned.