My request as AD/e-mail administrator was that the e-mail address not be a common name... this got translated to using First.Last for the e-mail, which I was decided was OKAY and supported.

But let the buyer beware! This got translated to the Helpdesk as "Change everyone's AD username to DOMAIN.LOCAL\first.lastname"

Which I never agreed to. It's like my own initiative accidentally got warped into something I didn't actually want.

I feel that distinctive usernames are a good thing, AND more to the point..... I was expecting the adoption of First.Last e-mail addresses to make it a little harder for bad guys to guess a valid username for dictionary attack purposes, which is a security win when deploying a new directory or migrating to a new AD domain.

If most of the usernames were something like <FML>[email protected] and all the email addresses are First.Last, then there's no definitive algorithm for guessing a username.

Alas, it was what I wanted, but it was not meant to be, once the moderately technically-savvy manglement (who know all about Win 2003 and Exchange 2003 as former Windows admins, but not 2013) got ahold of the project and assigned tasks for creating users for the new AD forest and exporting PSTs + importing their mailboxes to the environment directly to the Windows desktop team; without providing, requesting, or taking any input on how the migration ought to be done.

Or what the usernames should look like..... and how Username, Email address, and Alias are all distinctive fields, and shouldn't be forced to be the same, just b/c we developed this standard for e-mails, hehe.