User Profile Properties and SharePoint Profile Synchronization

Question

Every time I try to enable UPS SharePoint Profile Synchronization in the Manage Profile Service: User Profile Service, the service appears to work great and everything is fine, however some things end up breaking. Specifically, the Org Chart. When it is on Sync instead of Import from AD, the org chart in mysites no longer functions as expected. It only shows the current user option (no vertical or horizontal org display). (see edit one below for reason)

Also, I have enabled SharePoint Export of the thumbnailPhoto attribute in AD. So, when users upload their photos, it should periodically export those photo thumbnails into my AD database. No errors that I can find anywhere, however the attribute is still null in AD for all current users with photos. EDIT: I have double checked the mapping for this also, thumbnailPhoto is set to export in sharepoint.

Switching the sycn option back from profile sync to AD import fixes the org chart issue, (adds managers back in) but that won't work if I want to sync the picture (and other information that my users can change about themselves) from SP into AD. Anyone seen anything like this?

EDIT: So I've added some thing from this article for permissions hoping that it would help me out. I have noticed that, with sync only, it makes the Manager Null in each users profile, effectively breaking the org chart since it has no managers to build off of. I went into the "Edit User Profile Property" so I can see the options and it looks right to me... "Property Mapping for Synchronization" is set to manager with the direction set to import. Interestingly.. even though it has permission to replicate changes to AD it doesn't remove the manager from AD. I haven't witnessed the sync changing anything in AD at all.

EDIT2: I completely reconfigured the User Profile Service with a different account (SPUSERPROFILE) and followed every guide I could find to the letter (including this article because I really would like the picture export functionality). Everything appears to be starting up fine, running the sync fine, making the connection to AD with my new Sync Connection.. but it does the exact same thing. The Manager attribute is immediately removed even though I didn't modify the access mapping at all (it is still set to import).

Answer 1

I was finally able to roll through some errors I found in miisedit (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe) and found one particular error that stated:

One or more errors occurred. ---> Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileException: Exception while trying to migrate account 'DOMAIN\user' to 'DIFFERENTDOMAIN\user'. ---> Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The user does not exist or is not unique.

After some searching, I found some other users having a similar issue by searching the fields for the error title "ma-extension-error" and came across a guide to enable Import NetBIOS Domain Names.

SharePoint 2013 Management Shell

Get-SPServiceApplication

<lists the Service Applications and their GUIDs>

$UPA = Get-SPServiceApplication –Id <GUID of User Profile Service Application which is listed from previous string>

$UPA.NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled=1

$UPA.Update()

Code from iedaddy.com

Then, after resetting my SharePoint connector (Configure Synchronization Connections) I was finally able to get this to work. This solution fixed both the manager issue I was having and the picture export issue. I can only assume manager was broken because of the domain.NetBIOS domain name not being the same.

The only remaining issue is a permission-issue (Insufficient access rights to perform the operation.) on 18 of my users. Every user in the list has elevated permissions, and includes our entire IT department, so I assume there is some simple modification I can change to get replication to work on these users.