Query for Active Directory information via Sharepoint and MOSS

Question

I am responding to events that occur (like adding an item to a list) in SharePoint. I would like the ability to query AD with the triggering user ID and get back some specific information such as Department, Phone Number, Title and so on which isn't included in the SPUser information. Is there a built in way to do this? What is the best way of going about this?

Answer 1

MOSS has a profile service under the Shared Services Provider in your farm. It syncs (and can be scheduled to do it incrementally) to retrieve those common properties as the ones you mentioned and is able to map custom properties. This article has alot of useful info in it.

The Object Model will then give you the ProfileManager class and a few user controls are also available under the Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls namespace such as ProfilePropertyLoader, ProfileProperty, ProfilePropertyImage etc