SharePoint 2016: Audience Compilation & Manager Population issues with External Identity Manager Configuration
In SharePoint 2016 , if you have configured Synchronization Settings to use External Identity Manager , Population of manager Attribute for User profiles & Audience Compilation using Active Directory groups will not work . Let's Discuss this Scenario in Detail
Manager Attribute : Once the User is Assigned a Manager in Active Directory & sync is run . You would see the Manager pass thru the Sync Steps but the User Profile's Manager Attribute is never updated .
Audience : If you try to create Audience using a Member of Attribute of an Active Directory group which is being Synced . The Audience Compilation will not show any users .
The Reason of the seen behavior is Due to the fact that in this Configuration ( External Identity Manager ) the Post Processing events which are responsible to Compute & update Referential Attributes like Manager & Group Memberships are not triggered . And that this is a known behavior carried over from SP2013 documented here
For Eg. In "SharePoint Active Directory Import " Mode , we see following in ULS logs indicating Post Processing Steps execution after Moss_export for Profiles & Group Updates
07/14/2016 11:25:01.03 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x093C) 0x00F0 SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles afoeg Medium UserProfileApplication.SynchronizationPostProcessing: About to call IMPORTEXPORT_PostImportUserProperties 5ca28f9d-a7ef-40f9-0000-09ced720b07b
07/14/2016 11:25:01.04 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x093C) 0x00F0 SharePoint Portal Server User Profiles afoei Medium UserProfileApplication.SynchronizationPostProcessing: About to call IMPORTEXPORT_PostImportMembers 5ca28f9d-a7ef-40f9-0000-09ced720b07b
The Fix here is this Situation is to Switch to " SharePoint Active Directory Mode " & Continue using the External Identity Manager for Sync setup , Ensuring an ADImport Sync Connection is never created . Once you Switch to "SharePoint Active Directory Import" Configuration or Vice versa , you will Hit another Issue where the Sync would fail which will need additional Steps to Cleanup Connector Space Table & restore the Sync Functionality . Details are provided on My other post here
The Group membership & Manager filed Population is now fixed with deployment of a new time job " Updates Profile Memberships and Relationships job" that's runs every 5 minutes by default . This will be available after you deploy the Feb 2017 update for SharePoint Server 2016 KB 3141517 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3141517/february-21-2017-update-for-sharepoint-server-2016-kb3141517
There may be a possibility that the job " Updates Profile Memberships and Relationships job" may not show up in List of Timer Job definitions once the update is installed . This scenario is being investigated , till then use the inbuilt Health analyzer rule to provision the missing UPA jobs , as per steps described here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh487297.aspx