Implications of changing a domain user's name?

Soldato
Joined
28 Dec 2003
Posts
16,516
Never had to do this before so not sure of the implications.

I need to change the name of a Windows domain user. Not their logon name thankfully, but rather their Forename, Surname & Initial etc.

Are there any "gotchas" I need to look out for? As I'm not changing their logon account name, I'm presuming most things will be fine. One thing I can think of is email addresses, as our default policy uses various permutations of forename, surname and initials but presumably this will just regenerate automatically.

Anything else I need to watch out for?
 
You can change the username too if you want, everything will keep working. The important part for group membership, ACLs etc is the SID.
 
if its loads of usernames, i have a powershell script that reads from a csv file and imports it into AD

below script just does mobile numbers, if the users not listed, you get an error message. Can easily be changed for other things.


Command is
Import-Csv c:\powershellscripts\import.csv | ForEach-Object { Set-QADUser $_.samAccountName -Mobile $_.Mobile -Telephonenumber $_.telephonenumber}


the import.csv has 2 columns, A1 has samAccountname, B1 has mobile numbers

Script just works away and updates mobiles against the user.
 
The only consideration we have is our DMS has problems when you change the account associated with the DMS account. If you have similar third party software that depends on the account name then you might want to check that first.

But when people get married i usually just change their display name and add a new smtp address to their list of email addresses and that way their old email address still works. Sometimes they insist on their login changing and then i just have to change that and do some tweaks on the dms. They use initials for login names so usually it goes from rxe to rxo or something similar.
 
if its loads of usernames, i have a powershell script that reads from a csv file and imports it into AD

below script just does mobile numbers, if the users not listed, you get an error message. Can easily be changed for other things.


Command is
Import-Csv c:\powershellscripts\import.csv | ForEach-Object { Set-QADUser $_.samAccountName -Mobile $_.Mobile -Telephonenumber $_.telephonenumber}


the import.csv has 2 columns, A1 has samAccountname, B1 has mobile numbers

Script just works away and updates mobiles against the user.

It's worth noting you would need to download the quest qad powershell cmdlets for the above to work
 
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