Sharepoint 2013 farm administrator password

Question

Hope everyone is doing fine.

Actually I need to know can we change the sharepoint farm administrator password? I have researched and got to know that it can be change easily, but it's also recommended that change it first in testing environment.

Unfortunately we have a testing environment but if we change password there it reflects in production as well because we have only one active directory server for all the servers.

Our public facing website has developed on sharepoint 2013 and daily we get more than 120,000 visitors.

So please by keeping our visitors in mind suggest me what to do, If can be change I would highly appreciate if anyone can guide me through the process.

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Go to SharePoint Central Administration and select Security -> Configure Managed Accounts and click on the Edit button against the respective Service Account for which the password needs to be updated. Once the Edit page loads, click on "Use existing password". By doing this, the account will use the AD password.

Below is the powershell code for the above use case:

$ManagedAccount = Read-Host "Enter the Managed account in Domain\User Format:"

#Get new Password for the managed account
$Password = Read-Host "Enter new password for managed account" –AsSecureString

#Change the password for the managed account
Set-SPManagedAccount -Identity $ManagedAccount -ExistingPassword $Password -UseExistingPassword $true

Answer 2

by keeping your visitors in mind, in the normal case, the changing password process should not require an outage , meanwhile, at Production environment , you should apply it out working hour.

My suggestion is to apply this process first at Test, but in your case, the services account is the same in both environments , so you should care of that.

also, Try to list all application services , application pool , windows service and SQL services and make sure it's working and up running after changing the password .

Here you can find all possible issues that may face you and how to overcome it Managing Passwords for Service Accounts in SharePoint & SQL Server

The following are the required steps in normal scenario :

1. Navigate to SharePoint 2013 Central Administration interface, click Security in the left-hand menu, and click ‘Configure Managed Accounts’. Select the farm administrators to account in the account list shown, click the Edit icon and change the password.

2. Manually change the User Profile Service password. As required by SharePoint, this service uses the farm administrator account, however, SharePoint 2013 does not treat this account as a managed account so it must be changed manually.

3. Check if any applications in the Secure Store service use the farm administrator account, and if they do change the password there.

4. Reboot all the servers in the SharePoint farm, except for SQL server. SQL Server does not need to be restarted.

For more details check Step by Step: Changing the SharePoint 2013 Farm Account Password

Answer 3

Hi through following command you change the farm account

STSADM.EXE -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin "domain\username " -password "#####"