If you are a network administrator managing Active Directory networks or even a SharePoint administrator, you have to deal with a lot of service accounts. You may be tempted to set your service account passwords in Active Directory to never expire but that’s a security risk. If the password expires and you reset the password, or you simply change the password after 90 days, you may experience problems with your service. When dealing with MOSS 2007, your design may require half a dozen service accounts, or who knows perhaps even more. If you don’t create separate service accounts you are in trouble, if you create too many then you have to find an easier way to manage them.
Well, these are the issues that require careful planning of service accounts. Check out Microsoft’s Services and Service Accounts Security Planning Guide. Hopefully you will find some useful information in this guide that will help you with managing your service accounts.
