Baris's SharePoint Blog

In complex environments you often have to adapt the SharePoint people picker settings for performance or other business needs reason. In this post I'll show two common problems. Example 1: The people picker takes too long to find a user. The szenario is that you search for a user and you wait 1 or longer minute before the user is displayed in the people picker. One reason for that is often that the whole AD with all subtrees and trusted ADs is searched. This can be easily fixed by setting a filter to the people picker (like shown here ). Another reason can be that there are multiple Domain Controllers which the SharePoint Server tries to contact. There will be a delay if some of them are sitting behind a firewall like in a DMZ. This can be fixed by opening the ports to the DCs or by modifiying the host file, by pointing th IP of the DCs behind the firewall to  DCs in front. Example 2: Your company consists of multiple branches with their own AD You can tell the people...

I had a strage issue last day. The people picker did not show single users from an imported AD group. I looked at the user profile store and could find the user. I started a full profile import and could find the user in the user profile database again. (I thought perhaps the account was deleted in the AD) But when I search for the user in the people picker the user could not be find. Other users from the same AD group could be found with no problem. After all the reason was that the account was not active. The people picker only searches for active user accounts. You can check if an account is active or not with the following dos command: net user *username* /domain | find "active" (Replace *username* with the loginname of the user)

We had the problem that the searching after people in the Active Directory took very long. If you don't limit the people picker in SharePoint it searches the whole domain and all forests within. This can be very time consuming when the picker tries to resolve the names ( In out company about 1 minute). Therefore we decided to limit the people picker by domain. The problem is that you can define this limitation only on sitecollection level. This means that you have to do that each time you create a new sitecollection. I wrote a powerhell script which loops throught alle sitecollections and restricts the one, which do not already have a limitation. #Powershell for Changing People Picker Settings #Author I.Bikmaz #Add SharePoint SnapIn $snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell'} if ($snapin -eq $null) { Write-Host "Loading SharePoint Powershell Snap-in" Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint....