Important: This little quirk only occurs with the “SharePoint Profile Synchronization” (aka: FIM Sync) option in SharePoint 2010 and 2013.  It does not occur with the “Active Directory Import” (aka: AD Import) option available in SharePoint 2013 and 2016.  If possible, I recommend switching to AD Import.  You can read through switch considerations in my

Consider the following scenario: You have a fairly large and / or complex Active Directory (AD) infrastructure.When using People Picker in a SharePoint 2013 or 2016 site, you are unable to find users from certain domains, and eventually the People Picker control displays an error: “Sorry, we’re having trouble reaching the server”. You do some

Consider the following scenario: You have a SharePoint list with a Person or Group column.This column is limited to choose from a SharePoint group called (for example) Approvers.     Within this SharePoint group, you have three users with (for example) first name Jeff, and one user with last name Jefferson. Within the person or

Update 11/16/20: Added PowerShell script near the end of the post that can be used to check all of your site collections for a specific User Information List problem. Some potential symptoms: Note: The above behaviors can occur for all users within the site, or just for specific users. Why does this happen? All these

This is one that has plagued SharePoint admins since SharePoint 2007 and earlier.  There are a few other posts out there that mention this behavior, but as far as I can tell, none of them offer a complete solution. Consider the following scenario: The SharePoint farm exists in DomainB. You have users in DomainA. You

Often in troubleshooting SharePoint, we’re interested to know on which Web-Front-End (WFE) a certain request landed. When you have multiple WFEs that are load balanced, this is not easily discernable. One trick is to edit your HOSTS file and point the load balanced URL at the IP address of one WFE. That method certainly has

I find there is much confusion around this topic, so I’ll try to clear it up here. First off, non-imported profiles are well… not imported. They were not created by Profile Sync / AD Import / Sync with External Identity Manager. We also refer to these as “unmanaged”, or “stub” profiles because they typically only