Configure People Picker in SharePoint 2013 / 2010 ( Sharepoint People picker not resoving user)

When we setup a SharePoint environment without a domain account or SharePoint setup in a domain which does not have a two way trust with corporate domain then people picker will not work. This issues related to how SharePoint could communicate to active directory in order retrieve the user information , when we use a local account it will not have permission to talk to Active Directory so people picker will not work.

In SharePoint using stsadm command(unfortunately No PowerShell script is available)we could set which account should be used when people picker communicate to AD.

STSADM Command to set People Picker Search User

stsadm –o setapppassword –password “Test”

Above command you could give any phrase which will be used to encrypt the password

stsadm -o setproperty -url webapplicationurl -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests -pv "domain:corp.abc.com,domain\username,password"

ex: stsadm -o setproperty -url http://localhost:6666 -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests -pv "domain:corp.abc.com,ABCAMERICA\SHYJU,111111"

Then run the following command to check it properly set

stsadm -o getproperty -url webapplicationurl -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests.

You could also follow Technet Documentation

If you know the proper pathand domain controller of your active directory then you could set it properly.This could also improve the performance of people search because it need to search only specific domain

Set-SPSite -Identity http://localhost:6666 -UserAccountDirectoryPath "dc=abc,dc=com"

Following command will show you the property currently set

$site = get-spsite http://localhost:6666

$site.UserAccountDirectoryPath

If you have issue in resolving the Users in People Picker then following powershell command also come handy.

[Reflection.Assembly]::Loadwithpartialname("System.DirectoryServices")

$webapp=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication]::Lookup("http://localhost:6666")

$webapp.PeoplePickerSettings.ReferralChasingOption = [System.DirectoryServices.ReferralChasingOption]::All;

$webapp.Update();