SharePoint 2007 How to Setup a Full Import of Users and Profiles

SharePoint 2007 profiles can be synchronized in a number of methods but the other day I found that a lot of my user's profiles weren't synchronized with active directory. I couldn't get the email addresses to populate and it was a real pain to figure out how to get it working. In this article I want to explain the steps I took to correct my issue and try to help others with this problem.

First I want to fully explain what was happening with my user profiles. I had added about fifteen new users to a site collection within a SharePoint 2007 website. They all come in as domain\username and their email address wouldn't populate in the Mysites profile or the secondary profile within SharePoint. It's supposed to sync automatically with active directory but for some reason it was leaving out information. The reason this was so important to fix was that my alerts weren't working for these users because they didn't have email addresses populated in SharePoint. So anytime an alert went out these 15 users didn't get anything. I had to get the email populated so that my alerts would work.

So what I had to do was configure my SSP (Shared Service Provider) to run a full import of my users from my domain. It was already configured but I had to re-run the import (not 100% sure why none of the users were new to the domain just to SharePoint). To import all of your users from the domain into the SSP follow these steps:

1 - Open Central Admin
2 - Click on the SSP you want to configure (you may have more than one)
3 - Click Users and Profiles and Properties Link
4 - Click Configure Profile Import
5 - Click View Import Connections
6 - Click Create new connection
7 - Configure to match your needs (I will explain my setup later)
8 - Click OK
9 - Click User Profile and Properties Link
10 -Click Start Full Import

Once you have run your full import your profiles should now be synchronized and all of the AD data that is linked to your SharePoint profiles should match. The above steps will import every user in your Active Directory. I didn't want to import every user within my AD because it would be some 50,000+ users.

So for my profile import I had to do some tricky configuration settings because my domain is huge and contains so many different OUs. I only wanted to import the users from the specific OU for the site I was having the issues with. So when I configured my connection I had to set my Search Base to this specific OU. To do this you simply have to add the OU via the connection string, here is an example of mine:

OU=Users,OU=Oustide,OU=TestGroup,OU=FirstFloor,OU=Building10,DC=Test,DC=My,DC=Domain

This connection string was the most confusing part of the import for me, it took me a good hour to figure how to enter the string and where to put it. Make sure you are putting this connection string in the Search Base field.

This narrows the import down to this specific OU within your domain. You can really setup the import however you want; you could import every user in your domain if you wanted to. If you do that it might take some time, but you could import every user in you Active Directory. I didn't want ever user in my SharePoint SSP, so I simply modified my import connection to limit the users I wanted to import, which were the users I has having the issue with the profile synchronization.

Well I hope this guide helps you to get your profiles synchronizing in SharePoint 2007.