Today I could solve a wired problem. It belongs to User Profile “AD Import” on SharePoint Server 2019.

The profile overview of a person stated two different information: At the top there was the correct department but in the organizational chart the person had the wrong manager and so a wrong department information.

The organizational chart is generated from the “Manager” attribute of the SharePoint user profile.

In the profile I saw a correct “department” attribute value but a wrong “manager” attribute value.

I started a “Full AD Import”.

In the SharePoint log I saw an exception with the message, that a XML file in the SharePoint timer cache on one server could not be changed.

So first I refreshed all timer cache folders on all servers: Stop Windows service “sptimerv4” on every server. Find the subfolder with file “cache.ini” below c:\programdata\microsoft\sharepoint\config. The folder has a GUID as name. Than delete all file but cache.ini. Than set the content of cache.ini to “1” (without “”) and restart the service “sptimerv4”. The cache folder gets filled again. The content of “cache.ini” will be set to a valid value…

Next I restarted AD Import using PowerShell:

$s = get-spserviceapplication <guid>
$s.StartImport($true)

Now I saw the sync working in the SharePoint log but the manager attribte was not updated still.

My next idea was that maybe the property mapping had a problem. I looked at the mapping config but it looked OK in the editor.

Out of curiosity I have removed the assignment for “manager”. Than I ran the import and checked the user profile afterwards.

As a big suprise for me the manager attribte now got updated. WITHOUT MAPPING.

It seems that the manager attribute is mapped internally.