SharePoint and PowerShell: Updating an individual user profile properties

When a user cannot be found from SharePoint central administration by going to Service Applications - User Profile Service - Manage User Profiles, it is likely that this user had some synchronization issues that is preventing detection from the UI.

In my situation the user was originally sync'd from Active Directory, but we had some OU changes and broke the hierarchy.

It's PowerShell to the rescue!

This example will retrieve a user profile from the web application, and updates the preferred name and user manager.

#Set up default variables

$mySiteUrl = "http://mysites"

$adAccount = "DOMAIN\username"

$upAttribute = "PreferredName"

$upAttributeValue = "My New Name"

#Get site objects and connect to User Profile Manager service

$site = Get-SPSite $mySiteUrl

$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site

$profileManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($context)

#Check to see if user profile exists

if ($profileManager.UserExists($adAccount))

{

    #Get user profile and change the value

    $up = $profileManager.GetUserProfile($adAccount)

    $up["PreferredName"]

    $up["Manager"]

    

    #$up["PreferredName"].Value = $upAttributeValue

    #$up.Commit()

    $up["Manager"].Value = "DOMAIN\manager"

    $up.Commit()

}

else

{

    write-host "Profile for user"$adAccount "cannot be found"

}

#Dispose of site object

$site.Dispose()