I thought I'd take a little break from the constant stream of networking tips and share some of my favorite tools with you in a multi-part series. I'm a nerd and an evangelist at heart so this is very fitting for me, and hopefully helpful for you.

The first tool I'll share with you is probably the one I access most frequently. I practically live in Passpack as this is where ALL of my passwords are stored for everything.

With more and more of our lives and very personal/confidential data living online strong passwords are increasingly important. WAY too many people have very simple passwords (their wife or kids name, dogs name, etc.), worse yet they probably use that same password just about everywhere. Here's the problem. If anyone ever learns that password you've just risked every account you have. Online banking, investment accounts, e-mail... You get the idea and I'm guessing you wouldn't want most people to have access to all of these accounts.

But how the heck are you supposed to keep track of the dozens of passwords you'll need? There's your work e-mail, personal e-mail, Linkedin, Facebook, bank accounts, that cool NetworkInAustin.com site, the list goes on and on. That's where PassPack comes in. Through a very secure two step login process you only login to PassPack once and then have access to all of your passwords. Better yet it has an awesome password suggestion tool to invent impossibly hard passwords for you. Here are some examples from less to more complex:

UfYIZtS5vbDS
.dDgU!8bq&YK5#
|8Y´°îP÷PN£«çdÛ÷

Good luck guessing those! This makes it easy for you to have a unique password for each of your accounts. That way if something is compromised only that one account is at risk and you can always reset your password to something equally rediculous to keep the bad guys out.

Your online security is super important and this is a really easy way to manage it. It's also helpful for your loved ones as well. My wife, Emily, has the information she needs to login to my Passpack account should anything ever happen to me. From ther she can get to anything and everything she'd ever need.

The best part is it's free for up to 100 passwords! That was fine for me for the first couple of years, but I've just started paying (a whopping $1.50 a month!) as the number of passwords in my world has surpassed this mark. That blows me away, but I also use it to track other important confidential details: Social security numbers, Employer ID Numbers, and even more innocuous things like all of my frequent flyer and reward program numbers that I can never find when I need them.

Check it out for yourself at Passpack.com. There are other alternatives out there as well. Another popular one is Roboform

Happy Networking! (and other stuff)