SharePoint profiles not synchronizing
A while ago, a colleague asked me why her contact details weren’t updated on SharePoint. She got married and thus her name changed. The AD was updated but the changed weren’t pushed to SharePoint for some reason.
After some searching, I found out her MySite profile was updated correctly (you can check those profiles via SSP admin), but the information showed on our normal SharePoint portal wasn’t correct. So somewhere in between there was somekind of synchronisation error.
I started googling and found some sites stating that the stsadm command ‘sync’ (stsadm -o sync) should do the trick forcing to synchronize the profiles between sites. Unfortunately, nothing happend. Searching some more I found out that you should check the old sync databases and delete them if found (stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases). But again: nothing.
Then I found out there is a flag ‘Moving’ in the SSP database, check the SiteSynch table. That flag is set by the command ‘preparetomove’ (also an stsadm command) which apparantly shouldn’t be used after installing SP1 (do some searching for more info). I don’t know wether I did or did not use that command, but I do know all the Moving flags were set to ‘True’ in my SSP database.
Allright, so now what? The command ‘stsadm -o preparetomove -undo -contentdb dbname’ should reset the flag. I tried executing the command, but the flags wouldn’t go. Hmmm… then I created a little .bat file to execute the same command for every content database (if it doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt… right?). Whoah! The entire SiteSynch database emptied in front of my eyes. Having no idea whether this was a good or a bad thing; I searched some more… A couple of forum posts (MSDN) stated that you should start a search crawl after a full profile import. So I first started the profile import and then the search crawl and voila: there were the SiteSynch records again!
Being confident, I checked the profiles and there were all the changed being nicely synced! I don’t know whether this is going to last, if it doesn’t I’ll update the post with more info. But untill now, it seems to work properly again.
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