MOSS User Profile Import - Why can't I find Distribution Lists? Why is my AD Import failing?

Today, working on a proof of concept, a coworker of mine was trying to add a distribution list to an audience. This doesn't sound like rocket science but every time he tried to add a list he knew was in our domain.... NO DICE. Nothing would be found.

So, every post I could find on the issue said "DO AN IMPORT".

Here's some posts that we considered:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1839430&SiteID=1

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2006/12/01/getting-started-with-personalization-in-moss-2007.aspx

http://rehmangul.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/personalization-in-moss-2007/

All of these links had some good suggestions - all of them suggesting somewhere that a full import was needed to make sure that distribution lists were imported.

We went to ran a full import and we got ERRORS! This is where we discovered something very interesting. In our company our active directory settings are managed like so:

FQDN:   int.company.com

AD DOMAIN NAME: COMPANY

Most companies would normally just have a situation like this:

FQDN: company.com

AD DOMAIN NAME: COMPANY

When the SSP for SharePoint was set up, an Import connection for the User Profile was automatically created. However, in our case, the domain it set up was called "INT" instead of "COMPANY". SHAREPOINT PARSES THE FQDN AND USES THE FIRST PART UP TO THE FIRST DOT. LOL.

Therefore, every time we tried to do a User Import from AD, we got ourselves an error that "No domain existed for that name".

The Fix

• To fix the problem, simply recreate the Import Connection. This is REALLY SIMPLE.
• To get to the Connections: Shared Services -> User Profile and Properties -> View Import Connections.
• Create a new connection
• For the name, use the actual domain name "COMPANY" instead of "INT" <or whatever your first part of your FQDN is> and use Auto Fill Root Search Base to pull the search base LDAP query string out.
• Return to Manage Connections
• Delete the other Connection
• Return to User Profile and Properties
• Start Full Import
• View the log. There should be entries in there for PEOPLE_IMPORT and PEOPLE_DL_IMPORT.

Once you've done this.... Audiences should allow you to add any Distribution Lists and have the latest information from active directory. In large organizations, be careful. You might want to limit your query much more. One of the links above has information about reducing your crawl of AD.

Happy DL'ing.