Do NOT use diacritics in AAD user DisplayName!
Ondrej Sebela1 min read
Friendly reminder: make yourself a favor and do NOT use diacritics in the 'Display Name' attribute of your Azure AD users!
Why?
Problem
- Application installers invoked from the user profile will terminate immediately without any warning
- Probably other similar problems related to applications invoked from the user profile will follow
Cause
- Diacritics in Windows user profile name
- If AAD user logs in to Windows AAD joined device, a user profile named in the form user-display-name-without-spaces gets created (i.e. user 'Martin Jeřábek' will have Windows profile
C:\Users\MartinJeřábek).
- If AAD user logs in to Windows AAD joined device, a user profile named in the form user-display-name-without-spaces gets created (i.e. user 'Martin Jeřábek' will have Windows profile
Solution
- From my testing, it seems that it is safe to use diacritics that are part of Extended ASCII table (i.e. it is ok to have a user with DisplayName 'Martin Šek' because 'Š' is included, but 'Martin Jeřábek' will cause troubles because 'ř' isn't) 👍
- To be absolutely sure you don't get into any troubles, avoid using diacritics in the AAD user
DisplayNameattribute completely 🙂- How to replace diacritics? In PowerShell use code
[Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString([Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding("Cyrillic").GetBytes('Martin Jeřábek'))
- How to replace diacritics? In PowerShell use code
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Written by
Ondrej Sebela
Ondrej Sebela
I work as System Administrator for more than 10 years now and I love to make my life easier by automating work & personal stuff via PowerShell (even silly things like food recipes list generation).