I have a slew of accounts, thanks to my adoption of SAAS along with widespread acceptance by my clients. Each system has master accounts, user accounts and in the case of Google I have an account for each domain (and corporate segregate entity) I manage that utilizes Google services.

Trying to use Google calendars, email, domain management, etc. is a miserable task. Once you log in with one company's credentials you have to log out and log back in under the new credentials to do something with the other company.

So, how to do you get around this cookie driven problem? It could easily be solved by the provider. Some simple cookie modification that dropped a cookie with a unique user identifier on it, along with simple URL driven segregation of services. So, for example, if I'm at Google, all services could be google.com/account/service and all is easily segregated on my end with links and bookmarks. But, it's unlikely these companies are going to get together and work out a central methodology. Even something as simple as logging into a website has an hundred solutions and therefor requires me to store dozens, if not hundreds, of passwords.

The only solution I've come up with is virtual machines. Each unique machine resides virtually for each project on my desktop. Sounds miserable doesn't it? But, it strikes me that browsers could solve this problem easily and make it quite simple to navigate. You could have virtual independent browsers. Each spinup of the browser (or tab cluster, in the view) could have its own set of cookies, etc. Is it already out there?

There are a few solution options:

Profiles Firefox offers a simple approach to multiple browser instances with different stores for cookies, add-ons, etc. Using the profile manager you can launch each new browser instance (as many as your system and Mozilla can handle) with a different profile. I'm playing with different add-ons for certain profiles, along with unique themes to make the browsing experience unique to the profile.

To launch the Mozilla profile manager ahead of Firefox, just type in the following.

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -ProfileManager

Sandbox software Sandboxes are great for added security and purist segregation. Sandboxie seems to do this very well, but the free version doesn't allow for multiple sandboxes (the goal here). It does add a nice border around aps that are running in the sandbox, which you can color code to the different sandboxes. This acts just like my virtual machines, only no need to run an entire OS when all you need is an email client and a browser.

Virtual Machines If you're running 90 miles an hour with different personas, you may actually benefit from completely unique and segregated computers. In this case good ole virtualized machines do the trick rather well. You can run software like VMware, Parallels, Virtual Box (Free) or similar VM utility. The nice thing about a VM is that you can completely tweak an entire set of software and behavior to meet the objectives of that profile's work.

Special thanks to Brian Senecal for his contribution.