Changing USERID's after Go-Live

Question: I've been working on a phased-in implementation on which the third and final phase is about to go live.

Some of the plants already live have requested that their SAP user id's be changed to match their e-mails in their respective areas.

Has anyone seen this done and are there any considerations that should be taken before moving forward with this?

Answer:
In todays context when you talk of large scale integrations, user-ids are part of enterprise architecture and are driven more by policy and less by design. User-ids are usually defined in the enterprise framework and are generated by Active-directory/LDAP and can be replicated on to SAP or other applications. This make sense for any future apps. integration or even implementing SSO or CUA.

If changing them makes sense towards broader achievement of corporate policies and architecure, then yes, these should be changed but have a clarity of what these ids are going to look like in say next 2-3 years horizon.

Hope this helps.
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SAPFAN

Answer:
Ideally your company should have (or you should encourage it to move towards) a documented common and consistent userid policy. This should cover e.g. How a userid is to be created - its structure (i.e. how many characters, whether capitals and numbers must be included, based on surname or whatever); circumstances of change (i.e. marriage name change), circumstances of withdrawal/deletion. And it should ideally be consistently applied across all systems used that require a userid. This latter makes traceability a lot easier - especially where removal is needed following e.g. resignation/dismissal.
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Best Regards
Bazza

Answer:
There are some issues to consider when changing userid's after go-live:
All transactions are logged against userid's so keep the old ones with the personnel info stored for audit purposes. Ideally find an unused field in the new userrecord to store it in.
Also in PM some orders can not be processed any further when the orginal creator of the order has been removed from the system so do not really delete the old id's but lock them and take the roles away

Answer:
Thanks, guys. This is a lot of good information.

The client I'm working for is a State University system, so there's no manufacturing or sales involved - only FI, MM and Campus Management. I doubt highly they would get rid of the old user ids, but I can make sure that they don't.

They actually do have a common nomenclature for the userid's but the high-level project management team doesn't have a lot of clout with campus administration - after three years, in some cases, we still find ourselves bending to the wills of the chancellors (who are paying the bills, so we have no leverage). I figure if they keep the same nomenclature per university, that's the best we can hope for (and what they're apparently striving for, in some sense, by making SAP users the same as their campus mail users). I imagine this new nomenclature would follow the same standards they already have in place for mail ids.