## Short Names

Many objects in App Orchestration have both a Name property, and a ShortName property.

The Name property defines the administrator-visible name of the object. This is the name that will be used to identify the object in the App Orchestration console. Names are very flexible:

- The names of objects support most unicode characters, including spaces.
- Names can usually be up to 256 characters in length.
- The administrator is allowed to change the name of the object after it has been created.

The ShortName property defines the internal name of the object, which App Orchestration uses to correlate the object with systems and components that it is orchestrating. For example, a short name may be used as part of an Organizational Unit in Active Directory, or as part of the name of an object within a XenDesktop site. Short names are very restrictive:

- Short names can only contain the letters A-Z (uppercase or lowercase), and the numbers 0-9.
- The maximum length of a short name is 12 characters.
- Short names cannot be changed once they are set initially, as that would cause App Orchestration to lose the correlation between its internal data and the external systems that it orchestrates.

Both Names and ShortNames are required to be unique within an App Orchestration deployment. Note that even objects which are currently being deleted (see Deletes) must have unique Names and ShortNames.