User account management is one of the areas where the social aspects of system administration are most apparent. Providing services to a user community not only means that you have to interact closely with members of that community, but as a system administrator you will be one of the people primarily responsible for encouraging and, if necessary, enforcing the good behavior of the people who use your systems. Conversely, you will also be expected to behave responsibly towards your user community, and respect their needs for system integrity and privacy.
Technically, user account management involves a comprehensive understanding of your system; besides creating account usernames, passwords, and home directories, managing user accounts also involves understanding shell configuration, managing groups, and using various system facilities for limiting disk space usage and other resource consumption by account users. While traditional UNIX shell accounts are less common as a means of system access than they used to be, many of these methods for account management are used for email and database systems and other applications.