Caroline Sosebee

Caroline Sosebee is a Senior Software Engineer at ThreeWill. She has 30+ years of software development experience and a broad scope of general IT knowledge.  At ThreeWill she has a proven track record of quality consultative and software development skills, focusing on the design and implementation of SharePoint solutions, both on-premises and in the Microsoft 365 cloud.

Most companies these days have fairly strict password reset rules which can wreak havoc on a smoothly running SharePoint farm, if not planned for properly. Here are the steps to take in order to get the password for a SharePoint service account reset cleanly.

1. Active Directory – Change the password for the appropriate service account.
2. IIS (Internet Information Services) – Update the password for each Application Pool that is using the account. The password is buried within Advanced Settings, under the ‘Identity’ field. Click on the ellipsis and then the ‘Set …’ button to enter the new password.
3. Services – Open Services on the appropriate server(s) and find all that use the specified service account (you can sort by the ‘Log On As’ column to find them all). Update each to use the new password (Properties / Log On tab) and then restart the service to make sure the password change is active.
4. Scheduled Tasks – Open Task Scheduler on the appropriate server(s) and check for any jobs that use the service account, updating the password for each job.
5. Central Administration – Go into Security / General Security, click on the ‘Configure managed accounts’ link. Find the account to update and click the Edit link to reset the password.
6. Central Administration – Go into General Application Settings / Search, click on the ‘Farm Search Administration’ link. Click on the ‘Search Service Application’ link to bring up the Search Administration screen. Check the account being used for the ‘Default content access account’. Verify that it is using the service account being updated, click on the name and enter the new password, then click OK.

That should do it for resetting a service account password being used by SharePoint.