If you’ve deployed SharePoint before, whether in an Enterprise farm or on your Windows XP laptop in a Virtual Machine; if you still login using the account you installed SharePoint with (Local Administrator for example) you’ve probably noticed that the Welcome menu thinks your name is “System Account.”

Whether or not you use the same account you installed SharePoint with as an Application Pool Identity account in IIS is irrelevant, if you installed SharePoint using an account-and you use that account for administration, than it will assume you’re a System Account. I assume this is written somewhere in the Configuration database, but looking would be a big no-no.

However, just because SharePoint thinks that you’re a “System Account” doesn’t mean you have to look at that generic Welcome message each and every time you login to one of your SharePoint sites. In order to get rid of this behavior, a simple use of the stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials command is necessary.

However, before we get to that, let’s make sure that the desired name is entered how we want to see it in the Shared Services Provider-User Profiles and Properties area.

1. Open up Central Administration for your SharePoint farm and click on the Shared Services Provider link to get to your SSP Site.

2. Click on “User Profiles and Properties”

3. Click on “View User Profiles”

4. Hover over the profile you wish to edit and select Edit. Note: In my case I was using the Local Administrator account.

5. The third editable field should be “Name:” enter the name as you wish it to be displayed, for my Virtual machine I used my name, “Ryan Dennis.”

6. Click “Save and Close”

We can now move onto the fun part, updating our farm credentials!

Here’s how we do that:

1. Open a command prompt

2. Enter the following command:
stsadm –o updatefarmcredentials –identitytype configurableid –userlogin -password

3. You should see “Operation Completed Successfully”

4. Reset IIS
iisreset /noforce

Refresh the page and you should see “Welcome” wherematches the name you provided in the SSP Profiles and Properties page.