Considerations for application user names

Certain application user identities, such as the Lotus Notes for z/OS short name (SNAME) and the Novell Directory Services for OS/390 (NDS) user name (UNAME), can contain blanks or lowercase letters.

Blanks are not permitted as part of a RACF® profile name. Therefore, when building the profile name, ADDUSER and ALTUSER command processing will replace blanks with the X'4A' character (which often resolves to the ¢ symbol). RACF command processing also prevents the X'4A' character (¢) from being specified as part of an actual application user name.

You should use caution when specifying lowercase letters in application user names if:

Your installation shares the RACF database among systems that support identity mapping and systems that do not.
Administrators can issue DELUSER commands from systems that do not support identity mapping.
Residual mapping profiles might be left if DELUSER commands are issued from systems that do not support identity mapping. If the profile name contains blanks or lowercase letters, you might be unable to remove these profiles using RACF commands. See information about recovery procedures in z/OS Security Server RACF System Programmer's Guide.

For information about the set of characters supported for application user names, see z/OS Security Server RACF Command Language Reference.