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I'd like to understand common and practical username creation conventions which could be used in companies as unique names of user accounts. Let's say a small company with perspective of growth wants to consolidate its home-grown IT and want to deploy their first enterprise-wide solution. What username would be assigned e.g. to Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland and Emma Tillinger Koskoff? Please illustrate on these names as they cover some less typical cases. Please do not simply suggest a naming scheme, but add an explanation of its rules. Mind the conflict resolution when person with duplicate name joins the company or when different names in some cases lead to same username.

I already have experience with naming scheme which would lead to: mscorsese, ldicaprio, jmcfarland and etkoskoff. It does not give nice result when sorted and usernames are not very readable, but they are kept short and avoid most common duplicates (John and Adrian Smith won't collide).

I'm especially interested in username schemes suitable for companies up to 1000 employees, but experience with usernames in large corporations (100.000+ employees) is welcome, too.

miroxlav
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The company I run the IT for now and almost every large corporation I've worked for (10,000+ users) use the firstname.lastname naming convention for users, it is very easy for them to remember :). While this could rarely cause an issue for users that have names more than 19 characters long (windows XP only supports usernames up to 20 characters), windows XP is no longer a supported OS. It is unlikely that two people will be hired with the same first and last name. In that case, a letter can be subtracted from the last name, or more commonly a number can be appended to the last name. Ex: martin.carruth or martin.carruth1 or martin.carruth2

One other naming convention I have seen for large companies is firstname: abcdefg lastname: hijklmn username: abchij#### (4 random digits). It is safe to say this company definitely never ran into any collisions, but at the same time we found ourselves forgetting our usernames occasionally. Ex: marcar0862

Hope this helps :)

MartinC
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    But neither of these solutions solve the problem/hassle when a user changes their name(marriage or otherwise legal name change). – Mxx Apr 01 '14 at 13:12
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    @Mxx The "best" solution to this problem is to use a unique, company-assigned string as the username, such as an employee ID #. Of course, I've rarely seen this done, as people seem attached to using their names for their usernames. **, oh well. The solution I've seen used (which I did not like) for name collisions in an environment with over 100,000 users was firstiinitiallastname#@domain.tld. If your first initial and last name were unique, you got it without a number: HN00b, for example. If not, you got a number after your name, and they incremented sequentially, ex: MJones357 – HopelessN00b Apr 01 '14 at 13:19
  • I have recently changed an associates last name in active directory, it took me a whopping 3 minutes to log into the DC and open Active Directory Users & Groups, scroll down to the appropriate user and change the login name :). Powershell Scripts can even make it faster. Write a script where you supply the old UN and the new UN and whamo, it changes it. Also, OP never asked for this scenario. – MartinC Apr 03 '14 at 18:18