0

I'd like to understand common and practical username creation conventions which could be used in companies as unique names of user accounts. Let's say a small company with perspective of growth wants to consolidate its home-grown IT and want to deploy their first enterprise-wide solution. What username would be assigned e.g. to Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland and Emma Tillinger Koskoff? Please illustrate on these names as they cover some less typical cases. Please do not simply suggest a naming scheme, but add an explanation of its rules. Mind the conflict resolution when person with duplicate name joins the company or when different names in some cases lead to same username.

I already have experience with naming scheme which would lead to: mscorsese, ldicaprio, jmcfarland and etkoskoff. It does not give nice result when sorted and usernames are not very readable, but they are kept short and avoid most common duplicates (John and Adrian Smith won't collide).

I'm especially interested in username schemes suitable for companies up to 1000 employees, but experience with usernames in large corporations (100.000+ employees) is welcome, too.

miroxlav
  • 311

1 Answers1

1

The company I run the IT for now and almost every large corporation I've worked for (10,000+ users) use the firstname.lastname naming convention for users, it is very easy for them to remember :). While this could rarely cause an issue for users that have names more than 19 characters long (windows XP only supports usernames up to 20 characters), windows XP is no longer a supported OS. It is unlikely that two people will be hired with the same first and last name. In that case, a letter can be subtracted from the last name, or more commonly a number can be appended to the last name. Ex: martin.carruth or martin.carruth1 or martin.carruth2

One other naming convention I have seen for large companies is firstname: abcdefg lastname: hijklmn username: abchij#### (4 random digits). It is safe to say this company definitely never ran into any collisions, but at the same time we found ourselves forgetting our usernames occasionally. Ex: marcar0862

Hope this helps :)

MartinC
  • 355