Hyphens in domain names get trimmed from account names in SharePoint 2010 User Profile Import

We’ve identified that the user profile import in the SharePoint 2010 public beta can’t handle hyphens in domain names. The import will succeed but the portion of the domain name preceding the hyphen will get trimmed. When a user logs on a new profile is created but it is orphaned from the imported data. In principal we’ve been able to work around this by migrating the user profiles with STSADM (thanks to my colleague Martin Hatch for the suggestion) but we haven’t put this approach to the test over a sufficient period of time to be able to recommend it firmly yet. We also don’t have a mechanism for triggering the update for newly-imported users but it shouldn’t be rocket science to come up with a solution to that problem for the duration of the beta.

Microsoft have confirmed this is a problem in the SharePoint 2010 public beta and that a fix will be included in the next release. Their response was on a closed beta forum, so I can’t include that detail here, but this is my description from MSDN:

We’ve been trying to launch an internal deployment of SharePoint 2010 MySites but we’ve run in to a problem with the user profile import. We’ve reviewed all of the relevant guidance and have been able to complete an import successfully, but all of the characters before a hyphen in our domain name are getting truncated from the imported username. To illustrate:

PREFIX-BLAHtristan.watkins becomes BLAHtristan.watkins after it is imported. When I log in, a new user profile is created for PREFIX-BLAHtristan.watkins and all of the imported profile data is useless, since it is associated with a non-existent BLAHtristan.watkins.

I’m assuming this is an issue with the beta version of Forefront Identity Manager 2010 that shipped with SharePoint 2010 beta, but I can’t find any information suggesting this is a known issue and for all I know it may actually be a SharePoint issue rather than a problem with FIM. For what it’s worth, this was not a problem in SharePoint 2007.

We’ll be putting this to the test ASAP whenever the next release is available. I’ll update here if we find anything else out or if we find any similar problems in future.