Users not showing up in Sharepoint Audiences

Question

We are running MOSS 2007 with profiles coming from our active directory. One feature we use is "Audiences" which get compiled based on specific AD groups. We have problems with very few of the accounts where they do not get included in the audience. We have for example AD group of "Procurement" where 15 out of 16 users get included in the audience that uses membership in the "Procurement" group as its criteria.

It seems to be something specific to that account, but I can't see anything about the account that is distinct from any other. The AD accesss is being done by an account with full rights to read and write to AD.

Any ideas on what could be the cause? I'm not sure where even to look as the audience compliation doesn't throw any errors.

Answer 1

I don't have a real answer for this one, but what I would do is checking the log files (in the \12 hive) to see is there is more information related to the compilation of audiences. If nesecarry you can log more for this component by configuring the logging in the Central Administration site.

Answer 2

Can those users that are missing actually log into the site OK? They might just not show up because they've never logged in yet.

Answer 3

I didn't find a good solution, but I did find this very good posting on issues around this stuff:

http://www.moss2007.be/blogs/vandest/archive/2008/12/11/add-a-new-security-group-to-an-audience.aspx

Answer 4

How many groups is the problem account a member of? I've seen issues in the past where a user was a member of a whole lot of AD groups (like 50 or so). And the .NET code that checked things had a maximum amount of information it would return, or there was a timeout, or something else entirely. Regardless, we did some checking, and the problem account was unnecessarily a member of some of those groups. Cleaning up the membership fixed things. For the record, that was in a regular old ASP.NET app, not SharePoint, but it might be worth looking at.

Also, have you deployed SP1 and checked the patches? I know we had some troubles with audience compilation before we applied SP1 (for sure and maybe another hotfix as well, but I"m not sure about the hotfix).

Answer 5

I had a similar issue a while ago and it turned out that for some reason when the group i was trying to compile the audience against was the primary group for the user (it was a test account that wasn't part of the domain users group) the audience compilation would not pick up that user. I had to set the primary account of the user to something else, do a new profile import and then recompile the audience and it worked.

Cheers Carla

Answer 6

I'm having the same problem. I had one of my accounts set to a primary group and tested with that, but no change. SharePoint is picking up the group when importing but it is not picking it up for the audiences. When I am able to get the Audience feature to locate the group, it says there's only one user.