AD sync users with commas in names

[Jonathan Vardy]

Hi,

We have the AD sync working in Project Server 2003. The users in the AD have
commas in their names, like this

"Last name, Initial., Department"

Initially this was no issue, all the resources are synced correctly into the
Enterprise Resource Pool. Now we are having issues:

If I go to View Resource Availability and choose exactly one resource, say
"Vardy, J., IT" and then click the availability graph, I get a screen with
two users in the graph, "Vardy, J., IT" and "Vardy J. IT" (the commas have
become spaces)

I've tracked this down to a difference in the values in two Project Server
tables:

MSP_VIEW_PROJ_ASSN_STD >> "Vardy, J., IT"
MSP_VIEW_RES_STD >> "Vardy J. IT"

From the help:

MSP_VIEW_PROJ_ASSN_STD
This table contains standard information for assignments. Information in
this table is obtained from the Assignments table in the Project OLE DB
Provider.

MSP_VIEW_RES_STD
This table contains standard information for resources and is used to
determine resource availability for Assignment and Resource cube generation.
Information in this table is obtained from the Resources table in the Project
OLE DB Provider.

How this has managed to change all of a sudden is not clear to me, the
resource sheet when checked out still contains the correct format "Vardy,
J., IT". I've also checked other tables like MSP_RESOURCES and
MSP_WEB_RESOURCES and these still use the correct format (by the way, what
happened to single point of definition?)

We're using Project Server 2003 SP2A, could this be a (new) issue to do with
the SP2A?

Any help or info would be very useful and appreciated.

Jonathan Vardy

 

[FaisalM]

Check this KB article for some details on your issue.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/887025

--
FaisalM
http://www.FaisalMasood.com/

My Project Blog
http://www.faisalmasood.com/blog/msproject

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http://www.faisalmasood.com/blog/sharepoint

 

[Jonathan Vardy]

Hi Faisal,

My problem is not with the actual AD sync itself, as you can read in my
problem this works without errors. It's later in the process of viewing
availability that things go wrong. Maybe I should have used a better posting
title.

Also the tables affected by AD sync, MSP_RESOURCES.RES_NAME and
MSP_WEB_RESOURCES.RES_NAME, contain the correct values. The affected table,
MSP_VIEW_RES_STD, is not mentioned in your referenced article.

My guess is that this is a different issue. Has anyone else come across
similar issues?

Jonathan

"FaisalM" schreef:

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Jonathan:

It has been my experience that illegal characters in Resource names do not
always resolve correctly. When I encounter naming conventions in the field
like those your company uses to populate AD, I strongly recommend against
using AD synch. The AD synch feature is supposed to covert the list
separator (comma in EN-US systems) to semi colons. Because your resource
names contain commas, it seems as though your resources may not have been
initially populated using AD synch.

 

[Jonathan Vardy]

Hi Gary,

In this case al affected users/resources were synchronized using the AD sync
method. This was a step for us to set up our production environment, to have
everything synced via AD so as to have minimal maintenance.

What worries me is that the MSP_RESOURCES.RES_NAME and
MSP_WEB_RESOURCES.RES_NAME aren't affected. MSP_WEB_RESOURCES contains the
data synced with AD so if any filterening takes place I would expect it in
this table.

The affected table, MSP_VIEW_RES_STD, is decribed as follows:

"This table contains standard information for resources and is used to
determine resource availability for Assignment and Resource cube generation.
Information in this table is obtained from the Resources table in the Project
OLE DB Provider."

So this table, I expect, should contain data equal to the data in
MSP_RESOURCES or MSP_WEB_RESOURCES. Yet it contains a filtered version.

I've tracked the problem down to this SP:
"MSP_WEB_SP_BUS_GetResGraphMainRecords" which performs a UNION between two
tables, MSP_VIEW_PROJ_ASSN_STD and MSP_VIEW_RES_STD. Because this SP
retrieves to different names for the same resource I think the availability
view breaks. If MS won't be able to solve this, I hope to be able to
implement a workaround in the SP.

Not using the AD sync would because of erroneous filtering isn't much of a
solution, I would rather like to see a workable solution from Microsoft.

Jonathan

"Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]" schreef: