XCCC: A "SAMAccountName" Property That the Exchange 2000 Hosting Pack 1.1 Generates May Not Be Saved in Active Directory (316595)

SYMPTOMS

If you (as the administrator) do not provide SAMAccountName properties for user objects in Active Directory by using Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Exchange 2000 Hosting Pack version 1.1 automatically generates SAMAccountName properties. These SAMAccountName properties follow the rule:

org-ID_the first nine characters of the alias

If the ninth character of the alias name is a period (.), the SAMAccountName property cannot be saved in Active Directory because Active Directory does not accept a period as a valid last character. The Hosting Pack returns an error and the user object is not created in Active Directory.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs because Microsoft Windows 2000 and Active Directory do not consider a SAMAccountName property that contains a period as the last character a valid property.

WORKAROUND

To work around this behavior, either define the SAMAccountName property manually before it is written to Active Directory, or change the user name so that it does not contain a period as ninth character.

MORE INFORMATION

This behavior is most likely to occur when you (as an administrator) want to retain Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) addresses that already exist or when you want to follow a specific naming convention (for example, givenname.surname@organization.com) for users that you create by using the Hosting Pack. For example, for an input string such as "testuser.testname@testorg.org," the Hosting Pack tries to automatically generate the following SAMAccountName property, which returns an error: