What characters are valid for Active Directory groups?

Solution 1:

The names of security principal objects can contain all Unicode characters except the special LDAP characters defined in RFC 2253. This list of special characters includes: a leading space; a trailing space; and any of the following characters: # , + " \ < > ;

Max. size for Group name:

63 characters, or 63 bytes depending upon the character set; individual characters may require more than one byte.

Special Limitations:

A group account cannot consist solely of numbers, periods (.), or spaces. Any leading periods or spaces are cropped.

• MS Source
• RFC 2253