From The Field

One of the cool features of MOSS 2007 is the people picker; this allows you to search for a user/group when assigning permissions for example. This feature is particularly useful in a scenario when you need to grant a user permission to a site but you do not know what their exact username is.

The people picker is available using the icon highlighted in yellow in the screen shot below.

One of the issues with the people picker is that by default it returns all users/groups that match the query including user accounts that have been disabled.

This default behavior can be changed on a per web application basis to return only enabled user accounts. In the example below I have configured this for the web application http://moss using stsadm. This command configures MOSS 2007 to use a custom LDAP query.

stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter -url http://moss –pv (!userAccountControl=514)

If you are interested in putting together more granular filters I strongly recommend the following guide on LDAP, LDAP Query Basics - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996205(EXCHG.65).aspx

Brendan Griffin