Updating Display Name of a SharePoint User

In preparation for my lightning talk at SharePoint Saturday tomorrow, I wanted to make sure everything was working and looking nice in my demo environment. I found the need to change the display names of a couple users. This was a struggle through the UI, which sometimes allowed me to make the update for a specific site, and other times did not give the logged in account permissions to change its own name.

Turns out the best way to make this type of update is with PowerShell. After a very quick search brought me to Ranjivay's blog post, I was easily able to make the update for the specific sites I need to show tomorrow, using the following command:

Set-SPUser -identity -DisplayName -web

Supposedly the "Current Name" can be the current display name, but I preferred to use the account instead. So my actual command was:

Set-SPUser -identity "rhvm\robert" -DisplayName "Robert Hiskey" -web http://dev.hiskeys.com/sites/spsnyc

Quick and painless. Hooray for PowerShell!