[BBLISA] Enterprise user account naming standards?

[Bruce Davis]

The company I work for has grown from 350 users to over 2100 in just
over 3 years.  We have acquired several companies with different user
account naming standards.  We now have the opportunity to standardize
our Windows Active Directory and UNIX (LDAP through Sun Directory
Services) user account names.

1)  We would like to standardize account names to 8 characters or less
in both UNIX and Windows.
2)  We will use the Sun Active Directory connector to synchronize user
accounts and passwords.
3)  Both Windows and UNIX user account names should be the same.

My questions to all of you:  What user account naming standard do you
use?  How do you make sure each user name is unique?  How well does
your user account naming standard scale?  If you had to change user
account names to a new standard, how was user acceptance?

Any comments would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Bruce Davis
UNIX Systems Administrator
Medford MA