How to copy person that does not exist.

Question

Hello,

I need to copy SharePoint list from SharePoint 2007 to 2010.  The problem that one of the fields is person.  There are some people on the list that do not exist in the system anymore.

I need to copy that list.  Do you know how to do this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You should still be able to copy of the list to 2010. The missing users in the SPUser field will either display a Guid or unresolved (I've seen both in the past). As for copying a list, you have a few options.

Answer 2

I tried it but it does not work.  Gives me an error that there is a problem with one of the fields.  I tested and if I replace the name of the user that does not exist with the name of the user that exists in our system, it works.  If I change the name back, it does not.

I tried it using different users and different rows.  The same result.

Thank you.

Answer 3

Hi,

According to my analysis, by default SharePoint server 2007 doesn’t support copy list with person or group column. Because each site collection has a completely different table of users - and the index used on these tables is not globally unique.  So the same user can appear on both site collections with a different id.  It looks like it is based on when the user was added to the site user table.

So you need to copy this column via programming. I found two similar cases for your reference:

http://connect.nintex.com/forums/thread/10629.aspx

http://www.synergyonline.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=106

For more information about how does person or group column work, check out the following white paper:

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/10/09/how-does-person-or-group-column-really-work.aspx

Thanks,

Rock Wang

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Rock Wang TechNet Community Support