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People Picker - pick users with alternate email
A friend of mine has this challenge:
How does one make sure in SharePoint Online that a user can be searched/found via an alternate Email addresses which are different from the UPN they have?
example:
A user named steve@contoso.com is synced through AD Connect and gets created as a user in SharePoint User Profiles as steve@contoso.com - as the UPN
but his primary email (on-prem) is: stba@wallmart.com - surely one can find him by the people picker by a search upon the name Steve - but not if the search is done with: stba@wallmart.com?
How does one tell SharePoint that it should find users by the alternate email address?
Taen keren "A friend of mine"
To my knowledge this cannot be done through configuration. Are you looking for this functionality across all of SharePoint or just in one place? if the answer is in the latter, then you have some hope, but it requires you basically creating your own People Picker functionality which is no small task. It is likely not worth it... This could be a good one to submit to user voice but make it more generic. The ability to add other user fields to be searchable in people picker could be very useful...
Taen keren "A friend of mine"
To my knowledge this cannot be done through configuration. Are you looking for this functionality across all of SharePoint or just in one place? if the answer is in the latter, then you have some hope, but it requires you basically creating your own People Picker functionality which is no small task. It is likely not worth it... This could be a good one to submit to user voice but make it more generic. The ability to add other user fields to be searchable in people picker could be very useful...
talpeer
The challenge is just SharePoint, - when he searches for a specific user - by the name - a "wrong" email is served on that user - I can't see how he can solve this challenge.All the AD connect synced users, have a different email address, in one Tenant, their logon is their UPN - sure you can change this on the user and thereby reflect all the custom domains and the correct email address, but that still doesn't make them searchable by email in SPO.
You can change a user's UPN in the Microsoft 365 admin center by changing the user's username or by setting a different email alias as primary. You can also change a user's UPN in the Azure AD admin center by changing their username. And you can change a UPN by using Microsoft PowerShell.
Can you clarify both the architecture, and the issue? You are using AD Connect, but is this issue occuring in SP Online or are you using on prem?
It sounds like you are referencing several different types of users in different tenants, who are having different experiences. I think more informationis required to understand the full setup and the issue in detail in order to be able to give you an answer that ill be helpful to you.
