SharePoint Integration

Re: MOSS User Profile Service Issue

AM2010 — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:03:44 GMT

I've got a little bit more information on this, so I'd appreciated any guidance anyone could provide.

After some experimentation it appears that the call to GetUserProfileByName doesn't work for specific users in our Active Directory. We've got a complicated AD setup with a central AD domain controller and many other domain controllers that have two-way trusts setup with the main domain controller. Now we have some accounts with the same name in these domains e.g. MainDomain\TestUser1 and TrustedDomain1\TestUser1 or MainDomain\TestUser2 and TrustedDomain2\TestUser2 etc. Not all accounts are like this, the majority of the accounts only exist in the main domain. This AD setup is not ideal and we're aware of this, but it's the situation we're in.

The user profile database only contains users from the main domain (and no users from the trusted domains) e.g. MainDomain\TestUser1, MainDomain\TestUser2 etc. If we call the GetUserProfileByName web service and pass the user name of a user that only exists in the main domain it is found without any problem (note that we only pass the user name and not the domain name in this request). If we pass the user name of a user that exists in multiple domains, the profile service can't find the user. For these users the call to the web service will only work if we specify the domain name when calling the web service (this isn't an option for us as our forms do not contain any code and are deployed as Domain trust forms to SharePoint).

My guess is that the User Profile web service is aware of the users in the trusted domains, even though these users haven't been imported into the profile database. So when we make a request to the GetUserProfileByName, it doesn't know which user we're attempting to find and so it throws an exception to indicate the user could not be found. As far as I'm concerned this should work as there is only one user in the profile database with the specified name, but I'm not sure what the web service does behind the scenes.

This has worked in our development environment and our test environment as the SharePoint installation has always been on a single server, which has also been used as the domain controller. We're in the latter stages of deployment now and this issue has cropped up as we're deploying to a MOSS server that isn't a domain controller.

This is a long shot but would any of you have any advice on this? I'm aware this is potentially a unique scenario so I've got my fingers crossed that someone can help me out with this one. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Re: MOSS User Profile Service Issue

AM2010 — Sun, 02 May 2010 22:07:35 GMT

Anybody got any ideas on this?

I'm trying to retrieve another user's profile. The GetUserProfileByName web service works if I specify the username as domain\username, but it won't work if I only specify the username. It comes back with an error indicating the specified user could not be found.

I've had this working in another test environment by just passing the username, but now I've got quite a few browser based forms calling this web service without passing the domain name. I don't want to have to specify the domain name in each and every form, so I'd rather find out why passing the username works in one environment but not in another.

Anybody have any suggestions?

Thanks for the help

Re: MOSS User Profile Service Issue

AM2010 — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:12:48 GMT

Thanks for the reply.

I wasn't aware the user profile wasn't created until the user accesses the site. I always thought that once it was in the SSP, it was in the user profile database and therefore should be available using the UserProfileService.asmx.

I've since done some more investigation with this and found that if I call the service and pass the domain name it finds the user, but won't find the user without the domain name. So testDomain\testUser1 finds the user profile fine, but passing just testUser1 won't pick up the right user profile. Unfortunately hardcoding the domain name in the InfoPath forms isn't a viable option, so I was wondering whether this might be something I can configure on the MOSS server itself.

The weird thing is I've had this working in another environment by just passing the username, but there were a few differences between the environments. The main one being the server that works is a single server install of MOSS, while the server that doesn't work is configured as a server farm. The other main difference is that the server where it worked was a domain controller, whereas the server farm isn't a domain controller.

I've had a bit of a hunt around the web and couldn't find any similar issues encountered by anyone else. Anyone have any ideas or had anything similar to this?

Thanks in advance

Re: MOSS User Profile Service Issue

Ted Fitch — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:01:54 GMT

Hi,

The SharePoint user profile isn't actually created until the user goes to the site for the first time. I am not away of how you can change this or keep SharePoint in synch with your AD (there probaby is a way to do this, I just don't know how).

You might want to look at our Active Directory Web Service (ADWS) - it uses the full AD and not the SharePoint user list. You install this on your SharePoint front end and then you can use the web service in InfoPath to get data about the user. It brings you all kinds of additional information about the user (whatever you store in your GAL) which gives you a lot more flexibility and features than you get with the SharePoint user info

Ted

MOSS User Profile Service Issue

AM2010 — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:41:15 GMT

I'm using MOSS 2007 with SP2 and FEB 2010 CU applied. We've set up a server farm and we have a site collection hosting Infopath forms.

I'm trying to use the MOSS user profile service and specifically the GetUserProfileByName web service method to get a user's display name and email address. Unfortunately I'm having problems calling the web service, with some users not being found.

If a user logs in and accesses the SharePoint site, the web service (being called from an InfoPath form) finds their user profile without any issue. However if the user hasn't accessed SharePoint before, the user profile cannot be found (again from an InfoPath form being accessed by a different user). As soon as we log in to the SharePoint site as the user that could not be found, the user profile seems to be activated and can be found by the GetUserProfileByName method (even when called by a different user).

It seems like the user profile gets activated when the user logs in but before this point the user profile isn't visible to the web service. I've also tried running SPWeb.EnsureUser and this seems to activate the profile as well.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why these user profiles can't be found? Is it failing to synchronise these profiles properly with the site collection? The timer job for Profile Synchronisation seems to be running fine and there aren't any obvious errors in the error log, so I'm not sure why the profiles can't be found.

Is it a permissions issue? All authenticated users have the 'Personal Feature' and 'Personal Site' permissions in the shared service provider. Our service accounts also have all the personaliation services permissions.

I'm really at a loss as to why this issue is occuring. The user profile is there and can be viewed through the SSP so why can't the webservice find it? The workaround would be to use the SPWeb.EnsureUser method to add all the users to the site collection but this seems a little extreme when the user profile service should work.

Thanks in advance for any help.