User accounts in Active Directory have various attributes, among which there are two interesting attributes: samAccountName and UserPrincipalName (usually it is called UPN), the differences between which are not understood by many Windows administrators. samAccountName. is the SAM account name ever going to go away, as the name suggests, pre-2000 rarely exists these days. SAM (or pre-2000) login has a 20 character limit, which becomes problematic in my environment. > to recall UPN because the sAMAccountName isn't something you will want to > type in all the time.

In this article, I am going to explain the difference between a samAccountName and a userPrincipalName which are often used in an Active Directory context. samAccountName Vs userPrincipalName. Description. I need to do some more testing with the AD tree at various functional levels. Interesting. In Active Directory based environment, everyone should come across the AD attribute names samAccountName and userPrincipalName or UPN.In this article, I am going to explain the difference between samAccountName and userPrincipalName(UPN).. It was used with an earlier version of windows (pre-windows 2000). hello, i'm wondering if there is a downside to using the UPN vs. the SAM account names in AD. To me, a SID is a SID, so it shouldn't matter as long as SID is the same. It should be unique … Are there any benefits / dis-advantages over one or the other. Can someone please shed some light on UPN vs SamAccountName logons? The samAccountName is the User Logon Name in Pre-Windows 2000 (this does not mean samAccountName is not being used as Logon Name …

User login name is in the format of DomainName\testUser. using UPN instead of SamAccountName it will remove the linkage of their account with a domain and help the migration. In this article, we will take a look at the difference between the samAccountName and UserPrincipalName AD attributes. It should be less than 20 characters.