Discussing the ins and outs of developing for SharePoint and the Microsoft platform

This is something that a few people know about but a lot of people don’t so I thought I would take a few minutes to explain it. As most of you will know, WSS and MOSS are two seperate products, with MOSS extending WSS. User profile management is a MOSS feature that you get in your Shared Service Provider, which means that WSS won’t have it. To keep track of users in WSS each user will have a user profile that exists in each site collection (this is called the WSS profile). So what this means for a MOSS implementation is that your users will have at least two user profiles, a WSS user profile for each site collection they are a member of, as well as the main user profile that is stored in the SSP (the MOSS user profile).

The thing that sorta confused me with this though is that the two don’t instantly sync up. If you make a change in Active Directory and let the SSP import the new data, you will immediately see the change in the MOSS profile (so in the SSP and the user My Site) but you will not see it in the WSS profiles for the user (which you can see by browsing to a site and choose “My Settings” in the user menu). MOSS does have a timer job that will run to do this synchronisation but I’m not too sure how often it is meant to run.

However I did find a great post that talked about the issues with having the multiple profile sources, as well as how to fix it. Basically you can use the “stsadm -o sync” command to increase the schedule of a timer job that does the synchronisation of the details between the SSP and the site collections. I did that and got it updating great. So perhaps what would be a good idea would be to set this to run as often as your user profile imports are running from the AD, to ensure that when new information is sucked in from the AD it gets updated in your site collections. But definitely read that blog post, its got a lot of good information.