SharePoint 2010 User Profile Service vs. NETBIOS

Recently I’ve had a niggling problem with SharePoint 2010 UPS – My user profiles were appearing with the wrong domain prefix and it was throwing out the people pickers and org charts in my sites.

It boiled down to the fact that our company NETBIOS name for the domain doesn’t match the first part of our fully qualified domain name.

E.g. NETBIOS name is DanCorp but FQDN is corp.dan.com

The problem here is that SharePoint has a setting called NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled which by default is set to False.

The solution is to set this to True (see below), then delete your AD connection in Central Admin, recreate it and run a full sync.

BEWARE – Our tech support guys tried this with deleting the AD connection and it made our domain controllers VERY upset, we had user authentication issues all over the place.  If you follow the steps below you should be fine but be sure to delete and recreate the connection to AD in Central Admin before running a synchronisation.

Step by step

1) set NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled to True through Powershell (script below)

2) Delete the sync connection in Central Admin (‘Configure Synchronisation Connections’ on the manage user profile service screen).

3) Recreate the connection.

4) Run a full synchronisation.

Powershell script (save this as a .PS1 file and run it using ‘SharePoint 2010 Management Shell’)

$ServiceApps = Get-SPServiceApplication

$UserProfileServiceApp = “”

foreach ($sa in $ServiceApps)

{if ($sa.DisplayName -eq “User Profile Service”)

{$UserProfileServiceApp = $sa}

}

$UserProfileServiceApp.NetBIOSDomainNamesEnabled = 1

$UserProfileServiceApp.Update()