Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

176 Part III: Planning and Deployment
directory information out of Active Directory and using that information in different
ways in SharePoint Portal Server to provide the following features and benefits:
■ Searching for and connecting with people within your organization
■ Generating a personal site in the portal site for individual users
■ Providing better search results
■ Targeting content to audiences
Importing User Profiles
You can import user profile information directly from Microsoft Active Directory
directory services or enter it manually. You can also customize the properties of the
user profile to meet the needs of your organization or to map it to Active Directory
properties.
If you have already invested in an infrastructure based on Active Directory or
any LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)-compliant directory, you can
import user information stored in the directories. With Active Directory, use the
Import Profile to import the user information to the SharePoint Portal Server. Importing
user profiles requires a domain account. To use the incremental import feature
from Active Directory on a Windows Server 2000–based computer, a domain administrator
account is required.
Note While you can import directory information from any LDAP-compliant
database, only Active Directory is supported by Microsoft.
You can import user profiles from the same domain that SharePoint Portal
Server is installed on or from any trusted domain. You can also configure and customize
your connection to Active Directory to import users based on specific criteria
as a script in an LDAP query. (For example, you can create a script that selects all the
users that belong to a specific organizational unit [OU], or only users whose e-mail
address property is not empty.)
If you’re using other platforms, you can add users manually or write your own
connector by using the object model. You can add more properties to the user profile
if you need to extend the information that you want to be displayed about a
user. However, any such updates will not be propagated, nor will they update Active
Directory.