How To Handle SharePoint Service Account Username lengths Issue

Here’s a quick tip for something that I ran into again this weekend.  I was creating service accounts in my development environment’s Active Directory, and one of the names was a little long.  My account name was: AccessServicesAppPool .  When I went to SharePoint Central Admin and tried to add my new service account, I kept getting an account not found message.  I even cut-n-pasted the user name, but that didn’t work.

What I failed to notice was that the “pre-Windwos 2000” login was truncated by one character.  Here’s a screen shot of the AD account screen (in Active Directory Users and Computers):

 

My problem was I was entering contoso\AccessServicesAppPool .  If I had entered AccessServicesAppPool@contoso.local or contoso\AccessServicesAppPoo it would have worked.

I was able to figure this out rather quickly since I had access to the account property screen in Active Directory.  However, this same thing happened at a client in December and it took me a little bit to figure out what was going on, since I wasn’t the one creating the accounts in AD.  In that case, I had to count the characters – the username max length for the DOMAIN\Username format is 20 characters.