Managing Ownership of and Access to Your HealthVault Application Config

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Have you ever needed or wanted to access or modify your application configuration, but couldn’t… because the developer who has the account to log in to the Application Configuration Center is out sick, not speaking with you, or is taking a permanent vacation to Bermuda?  Even if the answer is no, would you like to make sure this doesn’t happen to you in the future?  The correct answer is yes, and I’ll explain how to ensure this doesn’t happen to you below.

There are two main things I’d like to quickly cover.  The first is to draw everyone’s attention to a new feature we’ve released in the HealthVault Application Configuration Center, the new “Admins” tab; the “Admins” tab allows you to add additional “Application Managers” who can then share access to your application configuration.  The second is to remind everyone that HealthVault accounts can actually have multiple IDs associated with them… so even if you only have one account set up to manage your HealthVault Application Configuration, you can have multiple Live IDs for different team members set up to access that single account.

Beyond either of those things, we do recommend that businesses creating HealthVault applications set up IDs (Live ID or OpenID) that aren’t associated with specific individuals for use in managing their applications.  Many times individual accounts are used, and this can create problems when people leave organizations.

Let’s work backwards.  Previously, you could only have one account set up to manage a particular application configuration.  This could be problematic at times, as developers might forget the access credentials, or the developer whose credentials were used may leave the company without transferring access first.  There has actually been a way around that, and while you can now add multiple accounts (see below), even with just a single account you can set it up to use multiple Live IDs.

To do this:

  1. Log on to HealthVault.com using the ID associated with the application in the Application Configuration Center.
  2. Click on the account name in the top right corner of the page (it should say “Welcome, <FIRSTNAME LASTNAME>”)
  3. On the following page, you should see an option to “add another Live ID or OpenID”.  Click that.
  4. You’ll then be walked through a process to add or remove IDs associated with the HealthVault Account.

All that being said… our new feature makes this process less of a necessary step.  You can now add more than one HealthVault account as an “application manager” for a particular application’s configuration.  To do this, just log in to the Application Configuration Center, select the application you want to add or remove app managers for, and then click on the Admins tab in the upper right.  It’s pretty self-explanatory once you get to that point, just put in the email address and name of anyone you want to add, or you can resend invites or remove managers directly.

Setting these things up properly now will save you time and trouble later when you need to access your application configuration, but the developer with the account is out sick, or otherwise unavailable.