SP 2013 active directory import - only AD group name appears, not users

Question

Our IT set up Active Directory Import for some groups that I am testing. Unfortunately the AD group that is mapped to the SP group contains the AD group name only. I do not see the users in the SP group.

I have a review workflow in SP where the operator is to select a user from a SP group. But the group only shows the AD group name.

Is this the intended operation? Is there another way to map the AD group users to the SP group so the users are visible?

Thank you,

Answer 1

As Eric mentioned, this is the intended behavior. I had one customer that, like you, needed to use SharePoint groups with individual users that mirrored AD groups. To do this, we wrote a custom console application to read from AD and populate the associated SharePoint groups with the AD group members. We set up the AD/SharePoint group name mappings in the application config file, copied it to one of the application servers, and scheduled it to run nightly through Windows Task Scheduler.

Answer 2

This is how it works, the AD group is added into the SharePoint group, but it does not expand or enumerate the group membership into the group. If you want to have users select a user from the group, you must add them to the group individually.