How to sync users from AD, I need to update the email address of 1 user

Question

I have a sharepoint 2010 portal without AD sync connection. But I can login with all AD user accounts. When I login with for example testuser1 everything is working. testuser1 has no email address in AD. I have set an email address in AD. When I created a task with testuser1, I would expect an email, but I didnt get it.

What to do?

Answer 1

In Sharepoint you have two places, that contain information about user properties:

• the site collection's User Information List
• the User Profile Service Application

As I understand you are not using profile syncronization - so you have only the information in the User Information List.

When you add a user to a site, in the User Information List is added element, containing information for the user at that moment. And that's it - no further updates are made to this information, unless you manually edit it.

For example in the AD there is user with

• Username: somedomain\john
• Display Name: John Carter
• Phone Number: 00359123456789

You add John to a Sharepoint site and in the User Information List is added the information above.

After a time you add an E-mail Address: [email protected] in the AD.

The E-mail Address will NOT be updated in the User Information List. When you go to the Sharepoint site and view the information about John you will still see only

• Username: somedomain\john
• Display Name: John Carter
• Phone Number: 00359123456789

You have to manually add the e-mail address for John to be able to receive e-mails from the site.

For the user information to be syncronized with the AD you need to configure the User Profile Syncronization (Configure profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010)).

Answer 2

The first time a user is added to a site collection SharePoint is reading the information from AD and stores teh info in a hidden table in the root web. If no User Profile Service (UPS) is in place, this information won't change if AD info change. A quick way to update the user using the same process as in the initial step is to use the Set-SPUser cmdlet with the option -SyncFromAd

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607827.aspx

Example

Set-SPUser -Identity MYDOAIN\SAMACCOUNT -Web http://sharepoin/sites/team -SyncFromAD

As the user information is stored in a hidden list in the root web of each site collection. You need to to this once for each site collection. In most cases the root web (site collection url) is the best option to use as the web parameter.