MOSS provides a great mechanism to easily import user profiles
from AD. However there is no out-of-the-box functionality to get
that information back to AD. This is often an issue if other
applications use Active Directory to read account information.
Over the past few months I have looked at ways to provide a
2-way synchronization of this profile info. Here are two
possibilities:
1/ Use the Shared Services User Profile Importer/Exporter. This
allows user profiles to be exported into an XML file. From the XML
file it is fairly simple to write some code that updates AD. Then
it just needs to be scheduled to run on a regular basis. A custom
SPTimerJob would seem like the right mechanism for the job. This
does still require a lot of custom coding. One good thing is that
the code for the profile exported is all available so you could
just use what you need and avoid having to export as an xml file at
all.
2/ Use the bamboo solutions webpart. While its not actually a
webpart it does perform the job without having to write any custom
code. Basically its a winform application that lets you create a
template of mappings from SharePoint to AD. The template can then
be used on a schedule to do regular AD updates. pretty slick,
however it does come at a cost.
The "webpart" has just been released and is available at
https://store.bamboosolutions.com/ps-45-5-user-profile-sync-web-part.aspx.