When onboarding a new employee for a customer, we ran into an issue when giving the new user access to sites in SharePoint. Assigning the license to the user and initially adding her to SharePoint went smoothly. But when it came to giving her site permissions (in the site settings), we ran into an issue.
The actual process of adding her to sites appeared to work – until you refreshed the user lists on that site. She wasn’t actually being added. We went through the process a few times, with the same result.
That’s when we noticed something funny – the new user wasn’t being added. An old user, however, WAS being added.
Root Cause
It turns out – the old user being added was the key to figuring out what was going on.
This customer uses the first name@company for their email addresses and Office 365 aliases. The customer previously had an employee with the same name and the same email address who was no longer at the company.
When trying to add the new user, SharePoint was associating the email with the old user (who previously used on SharePoint) and pulling her in rather than the new user.
The old user had been deleted entirely from their Office 365 tenant. For some reason, despite that, the user wasn’t deleted entirely from SharePoint. When we talked to Microsoft, we were told it was a glitch in their system. Not great news, but it did mean there wasn’t anything we (or the customer) could’ve done differently while offboarding the old user.
How to Fix
This turned out to be an easy fix once the root problem was discovered. We just had to completely delete the old user from SharePoint.
To do this, we had to bring up the list of ALL users for each SharePoint site. The easiest way to get to this list is by replacing the last number In the URL for the site with zero. Once we were on that screen, we deleted the old user from each site (this had to be done individually).
Once the old user was deleted, the new user was added to the sites using the normal method.
Browse to the site and edit the URL by adding the following string to the end of it: /_layouts/15/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0
For example, the full URL will resemble the following: https://fabrikam.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/people.aspx/membershipGroupId=0
Select the person from the list, and then on the Actions menu, select Delete Users from Site Collection.
Now add the user again following normal process & now the new profile should get picked up.
Clear browser history
SharePoint uses browser caching in several scenarios, including in the people picker. Even when a user is fully removed, he or she may still remain in the browser cache. Clearing the browser history resolves this issue. For info about doing this in Edge,
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