Hi Frank,

thanks for reporting your issues!

We have not encountered such issues before but are confident we can resolve them for you.

For this, I'll need the following additional information. First off, which versions are you using right now? Both products are being improved and hot-fixed continually. FilterZen should be 3.6 and PeopleZen should be 1.4 -- you can check in the respective Web Part setting tool-panes or the product 'Studio' sites (linked to from the settings tool-panes).

Duplicate profiles:
to make sure the duplicate items are not duplicates in your SSP, add to the PeopleZen Web Part, in the "User Profiles Properties" section, the following property line:
UserProfile_GUID: Id
Do the duplicate user profiles have different IDs or identical IDs?

Caching / Performance:
How many user profiles are in your SSP, and how many RAM does your server have? How many user profile properties are you using and how many servers are in your farm? (Esp important to know for our in-memory caching.) We have a test environment of 3008 user profiles in the SSP, on a 4 GB MOSS 2007 server. The first PeopleZen page after an IIS reset loads within 5 - 10 seconds and caches all those profiles in memory, subsequent requests are then very satisfactory. We did prioritize after-caching performance over one-time, pre-cached, after-IISRESET performance though, I have to admit. Would like to hear your specs to see whether we can reproduce this.

No, of course not a good sign. We'll probably be able to figure this out with your assistence though.

Can you send me via email screen shots of all your FilterZen Web Part and filter settings, plus all your PeopleZen Web Part settings? Specifically interested in the number of User Profile Properties being used.

Again, have you tried adding the line
UserProfile_GUID: Id
to User Profile Properties in PeopleZen to find out about the duplicates? Ie. do the duplicate user profiles have different IDs or identical IDs?

You probably couldn't test this because of that time-out. Can you also temporarily increase the page timeout?

"I've pointed to using a text filter against the list User Information List under http://intranet. I don't even know if this is the correct procedure, since you talk about the SSP."

Indeed, to be honest I have no idea what you're doing there. If it's a Text Filter (instead of a List Lookup Filter or User Filter), how can it be "against the User Information List"? Are you connecting to it, *and* the PeopleZen Web Part?

Indeed PeopleZen does not use the User Information List at all at this point. (Only planned for a future release.) So how do you use it, with a Text Filter, and why?

Again, looking forward to seeing, if possible, all of the details and shots required above.

Many thanks in advance!

Hi Frank,

thanks for your email. We have updated builds available that I'd encourage you to try --- your issues might just have been resolved with those.

Before you do so:
- go into the 'PeopleZen Studio' and on the 'Configuration' page, make sure the Alternate User Profiles Enumeration Mode check box option at the bottom is un-checked.
- perform a complete uninstall of the currently installed versions of both products,
- then perform an IISRESET and clear your browser cache.

You don’t have to remove your Web Parts from your Web Part Pages, just don’t leave the page open while you do all this. Only after the above steps should you re-download the newest builds of both FilterZen and PeopleZen, and re-install both.

These new builds still show the same version numbers (1.4 and 3.6) --- because they contain no major new features (well, in fact they do but nevermind for now) --- but have a higher revision internally.

Duplicate profiles: we are now making sure by ID that no duplicates are ever displayed. If there still are "duplicates", then they most likely already exist as duplicates in your SSP.

Performance: if this is still sub-optimal on the production server, you can try to grant Authenticated Users the Manage User Profiles permission in your SSP. Note that this is not harmful, even though it sounds bad -- it doesn't mean that user X can change the profile of user Y. (Usually this shouldn't be necessary, but depending on the SP level it might help.)

Note that you can now somewhat tweak how caching affects performance, in the PeopleZen Studio on the Configuration page under Caching & Internals:
- Cache Refresh Rate: keep this value at a low (less than 20)
- Periodically rebuild cache fully: keep this un-checked for better performance (read the descriptions there if unsure)
- Alternative user profiles enumeration mode: keep this un-checked to avoid the danger of the infinite loop I suspect you ran into on your production server. You may have had this un-checked previously, but we reversed the semantics of the setting so keep it un-checked.

Let us know what the situation looks like with the newest build!