How to Change a User’s Domain Name and Update Office 365

On occasion you may be required to change or update a users  AD account name.  The user got married, the user opted for a name change or the most common, a user’s name was configured incorrectly to begin with.

Below are the steps to take if your domain is also participating in directory synchronization to Office 365.

1) From Active Directory right click on the user and “rename”.  Ensure all required user info is updated.

• Update First name
• Update last name
• Update User Logon name

2) Update E-mail to new username from the General tab of user properties

3) Office 365 OAB will update within 24 – 48 hours

4) Perform a Directory Synchronization and verify the changes have synchronized up to Office 365.  If the “user name” entry in Office 365 does not update run the following Power Shell commands:

$Usercredential = Get-Credential “[email protected]”
Connect-MSOLService -Credential $Usercredential

Set-MsolUserPrincipalName -newuserprincipalname [email protected] -userprincipalname [email protected]

5) Log into user workstation as an Admin and rename the users folder to new name.  IE> C:\Users

6) You may also need to create a new Mail profile for the user so that the inbox correctly shows the new updated name vs. previous name.

7) Finally navigate to the users ProfileList in the registry and update the ProfileImagePath Reg string to reflect the newly named folder.  Click on each profile until you find the one that requires changing.

From a run command windows type regedit and enter then navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList