Most people would think that usernames are minor problems. But for the end user who has been working at a company for a long time and then suddenly they find their login does not work it can be a source of frustration that, if not fixed soon, can disrupt their workflow and diminish their productivity.

So administrators should treat and end users login problems due to unrecognized usernames with degrees of priority that escalate upwards at an increasing rate the longer a user is unable to login to their email accounts.

There are more than a couple scenarios that users can unknowingly lose their login privileges.

If an end user has recently left the company for whatever reason then an administrator will need to follow a (hopefully) predefined procedure which will allow for the removal of a now inactive account from the system.

One method that inexperienced administrators will use is to try to reuse the existing account of the newly changed employee. This means that rather than creating a new account and removing the old account an administrator will simply rename the existing account within Active Directory using a new employee’s information. Unfortunately this method does not guarantee that the old user’s accounts – and username – are not entirely removed from the system. Somewhere in the internals of the system, the directories and any databases – in this case Active Directory – there are remnants of the previous user’s information. A likely repository of information is the Exchange server that can contain the old user’s information such as their username. Continue reading Troubleshooting Username Issues