Can someone explain the association (or lack thereof) between the "All People" list in my portal and the Profiles in centeral administration? I have the same user showing up in both lists, but "All People" has nothing in the email field. This is preventing the user from creating alerts. I've deleted and re-imported all profiles twice, but no joy. TIA,

Profiles are used in the MySites features for MOSS 2007. The "All People" is related to permissions -- showing you all people who have some form of access to your site collection. The profile importing has nothing to do with permissions or user accounts.

Can you explain how the "All People" list is populated? I have users in my "All People" that no longer have AD accounts. These users don't have User Profiles.

The 'All People' list is a list of users who have access to the sharepoint site or site collection. Once added to this list, a user or groupmust be manually removed from this list to restrict access (the user is not automatically removed if the AD account is no longer in existance). The user must exist in AD (if AD is your user auth method) when giving a new user access to the site or site collection. User Profiles are used by the "People" features in MOSS 2007 -- MySites, Audiences, etc. This data has nothing to to do with authentication.

Thanks for the explanation Zach.I have 1 additional question related to the same All People vs Profile thread:How is the All People data updated? For example, when a change is made to user information in AD (LastName change or Email change) the update is not reflected in our All People list.We can manually change the list item in All People, but is there a more efficient way of keeping this data sync'd with AD?Thanks.-RCRay Chin

Hi Reymond, it's automated process that Sync the AD to UserProfile. You can call it manually by STSADM command .Thanks and Regards Er.Pradipta Nayak