Do NOT use diacritics in AAD user DisplayName!

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Do NOT use diacritics in AAD user DisplayName!

PublishedOctober 30, 2022

•1 min read•View as Markdown

I work as System Administrator for more than 15 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).

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With over 15 years of experience as a system administrator, I have a passion for automating workflows using PowerShell. I believe in sharing my creations with the community. Why not, right? :)

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Problem Cause Solution

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).

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 DisplayName attribute completely 🙂
- How to replace diacritics? In PowerShell use code [Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetString([Text.Encoding]::GetEncoding("Cyrillic").GetBytes('Martin Jeřábek'))

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