Does your SharePoint My Site show your domain username instead of your full name? We noticed this behavior during our test installation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh. After tesing out different theories of why this was happening, we realized that the reason for this is because the identity of the application pool for the SharePoint site was using a local machine account instead of a domain account. Since the account was a local machine account, it doesn't have permissions to look up your user account information in the domain Active Directory... makes sense.

So the solution to this problem is to change the identity of the application pool. In order to do this, you will need to go to your SharePoint Central Administration page. Click the Service accounts option under the Security Configuration section.

 

In the Service Accounts page, change the Credential Management radio button to Web application pool. In the drop down, select Windows SharePoint Services Web Application. In the Application pool drop down, select the application pool you want to change the identity of.

 

Now the bottom controls should be enabled to allow you to change the identity of the application pool.

 

Once you're done entering in the user account and click OK, SharePoint will alert you to run IISRESET in order for the changes to take effect.

 

Once you run IISRESET /noforce, your app pool should now be running under the new identity. If you are in doubt, check Task Manager on the server and you should see the w3wp.exe process running with the new identity.

 

Also a warning, don't change the application pool user account through IIS Manager. If you do so, SharePoint's configuration will not be in sync with the app pool's identity and may also cause your web site to fail to load. I got this warning message in Event Viewer:

The identity of application pool 'SharePoint - 80' is invalid, so the World Wide Web Publishing Service can not create a worker process to serve the application pool. Therefore, the application pool has been disabled.

followed by this error message:

A failure was encountered while launching the process serving application pool 'SharePoint - 80'. The application pool has been disabled.