How to exclude former employee name from a SP form (Person or Group aka people picker column)

Question

I am trying to prevent ex-employee names from appearing in a SharePoint form.

Specifically the column is a 'Person or Group' aka 'people picker' column.

I have a separate 'Employee' list already, but it is not always up to date.

Normally using AD is more accurate and kept up to date - since IT must adjust the accounts for people that leave the company.

Ideally I could get this to run off AD still, but do the AD accounts need to be 'deactivated' or what are the options? (I'm no expert with AD).

Additional Picture (following Christoffer's comment):

Answer 1

You have a classic case of an orphaned SharePoint user. SharePoint stores all users as list items in a SharePoint list.

If you just want to remove a single orphaned account - open this url http://SP_SITE/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0 and remove the user manually.

If you want to do a proper cleaning - you will probably need a powerShell script. Let me know if that's what you want - I will update my answer.

Answer 2

Having undergone further testing, I did what Denis suggested, but it did not seem to resolve the issue.

I created a test profile (called TESTAD). When I logged on as TESTAD I created some documents and list items. Then deleted the TESTAD user profile from Active Directory - my understanding is that for person or group fields Sharepoint gets all user profiles from Active Directory (via Azure). So I would have expected that by deleting the TESTAD profile I would no longer see the TESTAD name appearing in a person or group field, however I could still see it (bad), but I could not save it if I selected the name (good!).

I asked around and it was suggested that I need to clear the browser cache in IE (I didn't need to do the Further Troubleshooting step). I only had this problem in IE, but not in Chrome. Other users could not even see the TESTAD profile, since they had never selected it in Sharepoint, so it was not in their cache. Though some of my colleagues would still see cached profile names in their IE, not TESTAD but other user profiles of actual former employees.

Problem solved :-)