Add User to Group People Picker not resolving name correctly

Question

I am trying to add a user to a permission group on our portal and the name is not resolving correctly. This user's name has changed recently and is resolving to the old name and they are not able to gain access to the portal. I have done a full import of users from Active Directory with no resolution. Though if I create a new list and add a new column using column type "People and Group" the name resolve correctly. Is there some type of cache that needs to be cleared? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

When the user's name was changed was a new account created or was the display name on the old one changed? Since SharePoint's profiles link to the SID of each account a new account would have a new SID and there would officially be two accounts in SharePoint. When you resolve them in people and groups with the new name, you are pointing to the new account. If this is the case you can fix it by running stsadm -o migrateuser -oldlogin x -newlogin y -ignoresidhistory

If a new account was not created, then it may just be a sync issue, but I've seen duplicate accounts created too many times so I know it happens.

Answer 2

Yes, each site collection has a SQL table that stores the name of each security group/user.

Check to make sure that your Profile Synchronization timer job has run correctly for that site collection.

If the issue persist, you can call the SharePoint users and groups webservice to manually update the display name for that user.

Answer 3

I changed a display name in AD from "Keven" to "Kevin" and had one heck of a time getting Sharepoint to recognize this. Tried everything I could think of but he was still showing up as "Keven" in the user pickers. Finally found a solution.... logged into the Sharepoint site as the user which updated whatever cache it had with the old name. His correct name was immediately displayed in all people pickers.