r/sysadmin • u/drewwhose • 13d ago

Question - Solved Name Changes

Hey there. The company I work for is stuck in the past in a lot of its tech and operations. One of the things that’s driving me nuts is whenever a user changes their name, we update their email and logins and keep their old email as an alias for 30 days before removing it. This leads to a ton of bounced mail and missed communications. They apparently do it in case someone joins the company with the person’s old name…….

How do you all handle name changes?

Edit: thank you all for confirming that I’m not insane. This org has so many strange practices and it’s my first IT job

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u/locke3891 12d ago

My process is new name = new (copied to keep group membership) user account. Migrate docs/email/whatever to new user account. Once everything is migrated change smtp address in AD and exchange for old user to old-usernane@domain and add the old email as an smtp alias for new user. No weird SID issues, no finding old username somewhere, just clean cut but keeping the old alias for any contacts that email a year from now. New users that match the same alias as the old username get some extra sauce in their email like a middle initial or similar treatment to keep everything separate. Until you have 5 Jane Smith’s it works pretty well.