Syncronizing AD groups to sharepoint user list (through powershell?)

Question

I am wondering if there is any way to get members of specific AD groups (several AD groups actually) to sync with the Sharepoint User Lists, found at http://sharepointsitename.com/_catalogs/users/simple.aspx. I have activated the User Profile Sync from central admin, and the simple.aspx file is populated to some extent. However it seems that the user list only fetches those who have logged in at an earlier time.

Is there any way to get all the users of AD groups to sync with this list, and not just those who have logged in before? I heard someone mention it could be done with powershell, but I have had no luck finding out how.

Answer 1

There are two different things in your situation:

1. The UPS which is responsible for keeping user attributes up-to-date with Active Directory
2. The User Information list for a specific site collection. This list contain only the information about site users. So either they have logged on or have been explicitly added to a group or granted some sort of specific permissions.

If you want people to show up in the user information list you can use PowerShell to get the list of users in the AD group via

Get-GroupMember | New-SPUser -Web http://sharepointserve.com -Group 'Name of group'

If you don't have the AD tools installed on the SharePoint Server (and why would you unless it was dev?) then use

Get-ADGroupMember | Export-CSV 'C:\location\name-of-file.csv' -NoTypeInformation

Then save the CSV where it can be accessed via the SharePoint server. And then run something like

$users = Import-CSV '\\location\share\name-of-file.csv'
foreach($user in $users)
{
     New-SPUser -Identity ([String]::Format("{0}{1}", $user.Domain, $user.SamAccountName))  -Web http://sharepointserve.com -Group 'Name of group'
}