Sharepoint 2013 : Configuring User Profile Synchronization (part 3) - Importing User Profiles from Active Directory

Importing User Profiles from Active Directory

This procedure assumes you have completed the steps in the previous section—and thus have a working User Profile Service application, and the User Profile Service and User Profile Sync Service started in SharePoint. The following steps demonstrate setting up a connection to Active Directory to perform a profile import for the users in the domain:

1. Open Central Administration.
2. Click the Application Management link.
3. Click the link for Manage Service Applications.
4. Find the User Profile Service application.
5. Click to the right of the name to highlight the row; then click Manage from the ribbon.
6. If all is well, you should see a page like that in Figure 3.

   

   Figure 3. User Profile Service Administration page

7. In the Synchronization section, click the Configure Synchronization Connections link.
8. Click the Create New Connection button.
9. Give the connection a name and set the type as Active Directory.
10. Enter the forest name (you can use the domain name for purposes of demonstration).
11. Select the authentication type as Windows.
12. Enter the credentials as DOMAIN\spups and its password; you must use this account as it is the account used by FIM to establish sync with AD.
13. Click the Populate Containers button to get a list of containers, as shown in Figure 4.

    

    Figure 4. Populated containers for AD connection—import

14. You might be tempted to click the check box for the entire domain, or hit that Select All button. Avoid this; instead, expand the hierarchy and select the OU that contains the users.
15. Click the OK button, and SharePoint will configure the import connection.
16. Navigate back to the User Profiles Admin page.
17. Click the Start Profile Synchronization link.
18. On the next page, change the radio button to Full Synchronization and click OK.
19. Refresh the User Profile Service Administration page, and you should see the synchronization status on the right of the page change from Idle to Synchronizing.
20. The synchronization process is very slow! So be prepared to wait a while.
21. To see the status of the import, you can click the Synchronizing link. For a more verbose view of the import status, run the FIM client tool, available from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe.
22. Assuming there were no errors, once the synchronization job completes, you can see the number of imported profiles in the top right of the Admin page.
23. In the People section, click the Manage User Profiles link to search and view user profiles for those users imported.

This completes configuration of the User Profile Service and Synchronization for what is the equivalent one-way import that you could do with SharePoint 2007. The nice thing about SharePoint 2010 and 2013 is that User Profile Synchronization works both ways—so users may update their profile in SharePoint and see the changes push back to AD (or other LDAP system). The next section covers the additional configuration steps to write back to Active Directory.