In IT, it's common to segregate responsibilities not to individuals, but groups of people. This is handy for vacations, conferences, meetings or promotions -- power isn't endowed to a specific person and the redundancy means high throughput when necessary.

One problem is that not all systems we work with understand groups. In particular, they don't support clustering identities into identical roles. Active Directory and Unix have Organizational Units and groups, so for most of our systems, this is not a problem. But for websites, it's often the case that a single account is created, forcing us to "share" authentication amongst the group. Moreover, these systems are proliferating, increasing the number of shared secrets we need to keep.

Password proliferation is not just limited to groups; many people have dozens of passwords for various websites. Web browsers are including tools to remember these things, and there's several existing tools for individuals such as PasswordSafe or Seahorse.

However, you will quickly run into trouble extending this software to team use. Publishing updates is tricky; the worst situation is having multiple versions of an encrypted flat text file floating around (do I have the latest? did Bob update his version before he published the new version?). If you centralize the file, you have to think carefully about remote update or risk overwriting the only place that anyone actually knew the password.

My question is, is there any password management published and ready for use, which makes the leap from single users to groups? Bonus points if your team actually uses it. If a clear victor emerges, I'll make sure to blog a more detailed review.