There are a lot of cool things you can do when working
with profile functionality in SharePoint - e.g. people
search, my sites, audiences, people based workflow, profile
management..
But when it comes to developing and testing it can be hard to
tell how well things are working unless you have a bunch of test
users with meaninful profile data.
If you've ever used one of Microsofts virtual machines that come
with the litware test domain, you'll be familiar with Don Funk,
Brian Cox and the rest of the gang. Those are all active directory
accounts with profile data including direct reports which is
great for testing org charts.
So how can we get those accounts into our own AD domain?
Easy - Use the LDFIDE
tool that comes with windows server. Exporting the accounts into a
file and importing that file into a different domain does present a
number of problems: the domain name is different, many exported
fields are read only, passwords cannot be imported. I've gone
ahead and solved those problems for you, so if you want to import
those users into your own domain just follow these steps:
-
Download the
Sample Users text file. Replace the test domain
values with your own. I use DC=mossdev,DC=local. I also have all
email addresses going to mossdev.com which is a local mail
service. I have a catch all email account setup so that all
emails to my users feed into the one outlook inbox. I have also
specified an OU called Profile Accounts to keep them seperate from
all of the default accounts.
-
From the command prompt run
ldifde -i -k -f c:\sampleadusers.txt
To import all the users, you will need to keep running the command
until all users have been processed. This is because of the
dependicenies between managers/direct reports.
-
Download the
Update Passwords text file and replace
unicodePwd with your own base64 encoded password. The password in
that text file is "P@ssw0rd" which I often use for test
accounts. If you are encoding your own password its important to
use a unicode encoding of a string. The string value would look
something like "\P@ssw0rd\". You'll only need the passwords if you
actually want to log in with the accounts.
-
From the command prompt run
ldifde -i -h -f c:\updatepasswords.txt
to update all the passwords.
Now you should have a domain of 78 users full of profile info
that you can play with.
Now I can log in as Don, create a mysite and view his profile
properties along with org chart:
