Justgeeking

Introduction:

So I have been pulling my hair out for the past few weeks trying to figure out why my profiles are not synchronizing between the site collections and the SSP.  This issue was on a fairly new deployment and I hadn’t noticed this issue until recently. I covered a number of items that could cause this issue…I will share the specific problem that I was having.

Problems:

• Not all profile data was showing up in user profiles. The profiles in the SSP had all the data but that same data was not showing up across the site collections in the farm.
• Users had the ability to edit their profiles despite that fact I restricted that setting in the SSP.
• Users that had their names changed in Active Directory…still had their old usernames in their sites. The SSP reflected the change however.

Things I checked:

• That the SSP was synchronizing with Active Directory: From the SSP I checked the profiles and data was being copied fine.
• Checked the timer job
• Confirmed that “Profile Synchronization” and “Quick Profile Synchronization” was running and succeeded on each web application.
• Had users try to edit their “My settings” from different site collections to see if they can edit their profile data….yes they could. Which means that the site collections are running independently and are not being synchronized with the SSP.
• Checked the Log files and didn’t notice anything (didn’t look good enough)

The Solution:

So I review the logs again and notice an error that said the profile synchronization could not synch with specific databases because they were offline. Once I saw that message I immediately realized what was going on. When you create/configure a content database you have the ability to set the database to “Ready” or “Offline”.  I purposely changed all my databases to offline as a precaution to ensure new site collections will not be added to that database. I know I could have addressed this with the max number of sites but I figured I would set the database to offline as well. Notice the underline text below. Regardless, changing the database status to “Ready” did the trick.