Managed accounts in SharePoint 2010
Continuing with my posts on the new features of SharePoint 2010, today I thought I would cover managed accounts. Basically managed accounts are a way of controlling your service accounts through the SharePoint central administration, including simple ways to change which services run under which accounts, as well as an inbuilt mechanism for changing the passwords of these accounts (and even automating the process of updating the passwords). If you had looked at updating service account details in MOSS you would have come across this article on MSDN that explains the process – and there are a lot of steps!
The settings for managed accounts are found in Central Administration in the security section, under the heading of General Security.
The first option “Configure managed accounts” will provide you with a list of managed accounts that are in use on the farm.
When you edit the items in this list you can specify a password expiration policy, notification settings, update the password for each account as well as see a list of farm components that the service account is running.
The second option on the main security page, “Configure service accounts”, allows you to change which service account a specific service uses. You simply select the service, select the account and click save, very easy (especially when you think about how its done in MOSS).
The last link for “Configure password change settings” will allow you to specify how often the monitoring process checks the status of accounts for expiration, who gets notified as well as the time it waits between setting passwords.
That’s about it, just a quick introduction to managed accounts that will hopefully shine some light on one of the many new features in SharePoint 2010!
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