Question : Rename AD Account and Mailbox

Hello Experts,

We are Exchange 2003 SP2 and Outlook 2003.  We currently have Exchange mailboxes for all of our store managers.  They access these mailboxes through OWA in Citrix.  Each of the accounts/mailboxes are named with their own name.  It works very well.

We want to go to generic mailboxes instead of named ones.  This provides us with many advantages.  I tried just renaming the mailbox of a test account and it appeared to work just fine.  I could rename account, exchange alias, display name, default e-mail.  After looking with ADSI Edit, the only thing that remained the old name was the Legacy Exchange DN.  I don't think that would have any effect on just accessing the mailbox through OWA, which seemed to work fine.

Am I missing anything?  Are there any caveats you can think of?

Thanks for your time.

Tom

Answer : Rename AD Account and Mailbox

I don't rename mailboxes for any reason other than women getting married.

If you rename the mailbox then no one internally will be able to reply to any email that user account has sent in the past. Furthermore any nicknames file will have old information which will fail to work.

My preference is to create a new account, move all data, settings etc to the new account and then hide the old account. The old account is forwarded tot he new account. This allows all old information to work correctly, with new information being used almost immediately. The old account references will die out naturally over time.

http://www.amset.info/exchange/usernamechange.asp

Simon.