Renaming a user in AD?

[Chiefcrowe]

I have a user who changed their name and I wasn't sure, that shouldn't affect any of their permissions or anything right? It will just change their login user name, correct?

 

[MustISO]

Here are two articles to review. Shouldn't be a big deal but there can be some issues if exchange or home directory variables are used.

https://community.spiceworks.com/ho...d-exchange-username-after-marriage-or-mistake

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...-in-ad-2008-r2-ie-windows-7?forum=winserverDS

 

[SparkyJJO]

I renamed a user in AD a couple years ago without issue. The redirected folders still worked also (folder name is still the old username) and exchange mailbox renamed fine. I put in an alias for the old name so email sent to the original address would still get to her inbox.

As mentioned, YMMV.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Every time I had an issue where I suddenly could not get into my work laptop while on the local company network always ended up with the monkeys (ahem, help[less] desk folks) creating a new profile in AD. Not once were they capable of linking the new profile to old folders. What a PITA monkeys can be.

 

[SparkyJJO]

It isn't a hard process, how do they manage to screw it up?

.... never mind, I probably don't want to know.

 

[Mushkins]

It's as simple as right clicking the object in AD and selecting Rename.

Note that their home folder will *not* change automatically if it has a username variable in it, but it will work just fine and you can manually change it if you care. Likewise, any locally stored workstation profiles will still have the old folder structure (but still work fine).

If you're using Office 365 with DirSync there's a powershell command you have to run against the Exchange server to forcibly change to the new address if you need to update their email as well.

All in all it's a pretty painless process.