Profile Sync doesn't filter to all users on all sites

Question

A changed email address or name (or any other profile property) on AD does not filter through to all the users across all site collections.

We have a suspicion that if a users permissions are not inheriting from the parent then any changes to profile will not filter down from the root site collection. Is this the case? Does anyone have any experience with this?

Has anyone who has seen similar issues with profile sync got any areas we could look at?

We have tried running various versions of

stsadm -o sync

Answer 1

This problem is down to the disconnect between the UserInfo table and the Profiles. WSS only uses UserInfo table, hence the core platform in the team sites etc relies on this.

When you do a profile sync the UserInfo table is updatedd, but (and here the problem) if the User is identified as active. (i.e. they have actually contributed something to a site).

It is also more weird to the end user as the UserInfo table is per content database, so they only need to contribute to a site collection that is in that content database for it to be updated. (this IsActive flag was introduced in 2007 - I don't know why)

More detailed explaination can be found here:-

21apps - User Profiles why do my changes not show in other sites/