This guide shows you the administrative and service accounts required to install SharePoint 2013.
It includes the requirements, the configuration and the meaning of each account.
This Video is part of a series:
Active Directory Required Accounts
You need to create at least the following domain accounts in Active Directory to successfully install SharePoint 2013:
- SQL Server Service Account, e.g. sqlSvcAcc
- SharePoint Setup Administrator, e.g. spAdmin
- SharePoint Farm Account, spFarmAcc
The meaning of the accounts are described later.
Difference to SharePoint 2007
Service accounts in SharePoint 2007 needed 2 properties when they were created in Active Directory:
- User cannot change password and
- Password never expires.
If you skipped SharePoint 2010 this isn’t necessary anymore since SharePoint 2010 because we now have managed accounts capable of password expiration and automatic change.
I always use in my development environment the options “User cannot change password” and “Password never expires”.
Assign permission
The SharePoint 2013 setup administrator is the only account where you need to assign permission manually.
SQL Server Service Account
- Permission are assigned automatically during installation of SQL Server 2012.
- The SQL Server service account should be a domain account and is used to run SQL Server.
SharePoint Setup Administrator
- You need to manually assign permissions.
- The setup administrator is used to install SharePoint 2013.
- The SharePoint 2013 setup administrator has to be a member of the administrators group on every server SharePoint should be installed.
- This account also needs the securityadmin and dbcreator role in SQL Server.
- If I create a development environment I also assign the sysadmin role during the setup of SQL Server 2012 so I have only 1 account I need to administrate Windows Server, SQL Server and SharePoint.
Farm Account
Permissions are automatically assigned by the SharePoint 2013 setup administrator so you don’t have to do it.
The farm account is used for the following things [1]:
- “Configure and manage the server farm.”
- “Act as the application pool identity for the SharePoint Central Administration Web site.”
- “Run the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service.”
Resources
Here are the resources used in this article:
Next steps