LastPass Challenges with Multiple Organizations

As a parallel entrepreneur, I’m a participating member of multiple companies. That brings with it some unique challenges, as many software tools don’t gracefully handle a user belonging to multiple organizations. I’ve learned to deal with that in many situations. Typically I’ll often having to log out and back in as the desired user or have multiple browsers or browser profiles open – one for each organization.

One area that has been particularly challenging has been group password management. There are not a lot of software options, although there are getting to be some new players. LastPass is the most mature option, and is the product that I have used for a long time. I investigated some alternatives including 1Password and DashLane. Both of those looked a little more modern and polished, but neither seemed to have mature support for multiple organizations.

Lastpass does claim to have robust support for organizations, but there is minimal, if any, mention on their website or elsewhere that mentions belonging to multiple organizations. It has taken me a lot of experimenting, but I’ve finally come up with a solution that works well.

You might think, as the diagram above indicates, that each organization to which you belong should invite your personal account to become a member of the organization. You would be wrong. Although this seems like the intuitive relationship, it does not work since LastPass only allows a personal account to attach to exactly one LastPass Enterprise account. Not more.

The correct way to belong to multiple Enterprise Accounts in LastPass is to choose one of the organizations to be your “Main” account to which you log in on a daily basis. You connect your Personal account to this enterprise account so that your personal sites appear alongside your work passwords.

Then, to add additional organizations, you don’t purchase a user license in those other organizations. Instead you create one or more shared folders, and share the folders with the email address for your “Main” organization account. There is a limitation that you can’t be an admin of the shared folders in these other organizations since you are not part of the Enterprise, but sharing and day-to-day password usage works generally as expected.

This method seems less intuitive, but works well now that I’ve figured it out. As I’ve learned more about how LastPass works internally, I understand why this unorthodox configuration is required

A few other quirks I’ve found, which just take some getting used-to:

• Shared folders from my personal account DO NOT SHOW UP when logged into my enterprise account. You have to share to your main organization email address instead.
• Folder structure in my Personal Account is not confusing in the User-Interface when browsing passwords in my enterprise account. The folder-within-folder structure doesn’t render well, and it is confusing as to which “level” I’m at.

I hope that the folks at LastPass are able to simplify this or make it more obvious how it is to be configured.

Do you have a better solution for password sharing with multiple organizations? Please let me and others know in the comments.