Category: User Profiles

This post is about how a simple web service failure, caused by a networking or Active Directory issue can take your site down. I’ve come across this a few different ways. The behavior is almost always intermittent, making it hard to track down.   Possible Symptoms: Users intermittently receive a “Something Went Wrong” message when

Update 4/15/20: I have now tested this with AD Import and both SharePoint 2016 and 2019. It’s the same problem in both versions. This problem manifests itself in a few different ways: You create an Audience based on “Member Of” the “Domain Users” group. You notice there are only a couple (or maybe even zero)

Update 4/10/20: We’ve found a number of customers manually mapping profile properties for AD Import because that’s what they had done in previous versions of SharePoint using FIM Sync. There can be problems in certain scenarios when doing this. For example, if you manually map “WorkEmail” property to the “proxyAddresses” AD attribute, that explicit mapping

This is part 4 in a series. You can find other parts here: SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part1 SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part 2 – 2010 SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part 3 – 2013 SharePoint: The complete guide to user

This is part 3 in a series. You can find other parts here: SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part1 SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part 2 – 2010 SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part 4 – 2016 SharePoint: The complete guide to user

This is part 2 in a series. You can find other parts here: SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part1 SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part 3 – 2013 SharePoint: The complete guide to user profile cleanup – Part 4 – 2016 SharePoint: The complete guide to user

Part 1: High-level Concepts If you have certain users that still show in the organization chart web part or “people search” results after being deleted or disabled in Active Directory, then it’s likely that the process to automatically clean up those user profiles is not working. Throughout the lifetime of SharePoint, there have been several