Best Practice for User Name Change?

[MichaelMarshall]

I'm surprised this hasn't come up at my company previously with regards to our Windchill installation...but then again, 98% of our Windchill users are male...

What is the Best Practice for handling a user's name change in Windchill? Jane Single would now like for her log in to reflect her new surname, Married.

I'm not seeing an easy way to change the username from 'jsingle' to 'jmarried' and have everything remain intact. But the correct answer isn't to create a new user 'jmarried' and remove access from data for 'jsingle'. At least I don't see that being the best way to handle.

I haven't called PTC yet, but wanted to see how others handle this from a policy and system change standpoint.

Thanks!

[ddemay]

Change the login I'd in the wtuser database table and in the ldap.



Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

[SteveVinyard]

Just use an Alias. The Administrator account in Windchill uses an Alias...hence you are able to login as WCADMIN instead of "Administrator" every time. 5 second fix

Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

[cid:image001.gif@01CB24C2.9AF27F30]

[ddemay]

Always forget about this one.This works too assuming you're not using all of
them already i.e. to allow users to login with email, employee id, or
alternate userids. Just wanted to add also that you'll have to update the
user's full name attribute.

[tbusch]

I'd like to tag on a slightly modified version of the same question: What if you need to change username for *all* users? Say you're going from using first.last to using email address for login?

[SteveVinyard]

I know you can use a .csv file for loading users (dataloader vsc2xml utility). It may be able to update users using the same method but I haven't done it.

Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

[cid:image001.gif@01CB24D2.24BA6AC0]

[ddemay]

Csv does not work for aliases...opened a call on it earlier this year. You can create an ldif export of current config and insert an additional uid=alias under each user and reimport and it will work exactly the same way.

On updatimng other attributes it should work as steve said because the csv has a column for existing and new Id. Worth a try on a dev system to know for sure.




Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

[MichaelMarshall]

Thanks to all who replied so quickly.

Several who replied privately (Tyler was first) said to just use the Principal Administrator, changing the User Name, Full Name, and e-mail address (if applicable). No need to mess with databases or LDAPs. What gave me confidence with this solution is that the suggesters of this routine had been doing it for quite some time.

Of course, our scenario is straightforward...we use Windchill DS, not Aphelion, so we're not tied in to any other LDAP system.

I tried this in our test system, and everything went well. I made the change to the user's profile in our production system...seems fine, can log in and find all of the doc's. Will post if we have any issues down the road.