MOSS Service accounts

I recently attended a great 2 day event at MSFT, the UK User Groups came together and had 2 full days of presentations, demo's and discussions, I found it very beneficial, the SUGUK sessions were great and I thought Mark Wilson's session on Hyper-V was excellent...

 

There were several questions raised in the SharePoint track chalk and talk sessions about service accounts so I thought I'd clarify things a little bit... I'll also see if a SUGUK session on Content DB's and Licensing is warranted, there were a few questions around these topics and I was asked about them by several people during the breaks, watch this space...

 

MOSS requires several service accounts, fact. Running everything as one user isn't good practice and isn't a good idea, even for dev/demo - IMO at least, Colin and Nick don't completely agree...

So, how many accounts do you need to run MOSS? The answer: "it depends..."

(yes, I am a technical consultant, since when did you expect me to actually answer a question?)

 

Seriously though, it does depend on your scenario, but at least 6...

 

Here a table that breaks down what you need:

 

Account Type	Purpose	Suggested Service Account
MOSS Farm Account	Server Farm Account This account needs some SQL permissions granting: dbcreator and security admin (do not grant this account SA!) If using ADACM this is the account used for creating objects in the OU specified - so you'll need to delagate permissions on the OU to this user.	_Serv_MOSSFarm1
MOSS App Pool	Identity for the any MOSS Web App Application Pool(s)A separate process identity should be used for each content Web App (this allows for greater security and auditing). Using the site name in the naming is not advisable as although this may make troubleshooting and auditing easier it reduces security by showing the relationship between App Pools and Web Apps.	_Serv_MOSSAppPool1 _Serv_MOSSAppPool2 _Serv_MOSSAppPool3
SSP Service Account	SSP service account	_Serv_MOSSSSP1
SSP App Pool	Identity for the SSP Web App Application Pool	_Serv_MOSSSSPAppPool1
MOSS Search	Account under which the Office SharePoint Server Search runs under	_Serv_MOSSSearch1
MOSS Content Access	Account used to access content sources to be crawled and indexed. Need to grant this account permission to any NON-MOSS content sources (e.g. NTFS file share, Exchange public folder, websites etc...)Separate accounts may be configured for access to specific content sources using crawl rules.	_Serv_MOSSCrawl1
User profile & Properties Access Account	Account used to access Active Directory for the Profile import	_Serv_MOSSDSA1
WSS Search	Account which the Windows SharePoint Services Search service runs under. Due to the fact the Office SharePoint Server Search service is running this will only index the WSS Help files.	_Serv_MOSSWSSSearch1
WSS Content Access	Account used by WSS search service to crawl content.	_Serv_MOSSWSSCrawl1
MOSS Install Account	Account used to install MOSS and perform all the required configuration changes.As this account will be used to install and configure the SharePoint servers it must be granted local admin on all farms members and have permissions to the SQL instance.This account can be disabled after installation and configuration is complete (it is not advised to delete it).	_Serv_MOSSInstall1
SQL Services	Used to run MS SQL Services	_Serv_SQLSVC1 _Serv_SQLRS1 _Serv_SQLAS1

 

 

Hope this helps!

 

Useful reading:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263445.aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934838