mylifeinaminute.com

Ah yes, the people picker again. I recently inherited an environment where the previous administrator was kind enough to not document anything, especially the items he/she had been playing with in development.

When trying to designate a user as a Primary Site Collection Administrator in Central Administration, I was unable to query for subsets of domain users on a single web application. After checking all of the usual suspects (Peoplepicker-searchadforests I’m looking at you) with no success, it was off to the not-so-usual suspects.

It turns out the previous admin was kind enough to set the Peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter property on the main portal site collection. After setting the property to null

stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter -pv "" -url [URL]

all was once again right with the world.

Now where did I leave my sledgehammer?

After a recent farm migration, a number of content databases were left offline. This had the unintended consequence of not allowing user profile synchronization to occur across site collections (where the content databases were offline).

The quick fix? Bring the content database(s) online.

The moral of the story? Do not leave your content database(s) offline without a good reason. If you do leave them offline, User Information Lists in the offline site collections will not be synchronized with the SSP.

Updates to a user’s profile properties can be performed with the following:

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Retrieving a user’s profile properties can be achieved with the following block:

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