Using local accounts as a managed account in SharePoint 2013

A managed account is an account that is registered within SharePoint 2013 and can be assigned to SharePoint services. The advantage with managed accounts is that they are centrally managed and can be reused across services. However if you are on a SharePoint 2013 environment which is not connected to a domain and try to register a local account as a managed account from the central admin you will get an error

The specified user is a local account. Local accounts should only be used in stand alone mode

Registering local user account as a managed account can be accomplished by using the PowerShell command “New-SPManagedAccount” and passing the local account as the credential parameter. Below are the steps

1.    Get the credentials of local user account and assign to a variable

$AppPoolAct = Get-Credential <local user account>

2.    Execute the New-SPManagedAccount command and pass the variable to the credential parameter

New-SPManagedAccount –Credential $AppPoolAct

3.    The local account would be registered as managed account and warning message in yellow will be displayed.

Now we can use the managed account created in PowerShell for configuring service applications such as the secured store services in central administration.