I had a user who got married and submitted her name change to the company.  Active Directory was properly updated.  Her old last name (Smith) does not appear anywhere in her AD record and has been replaced with her new last name (Jones).   We have SharePoint 2010 set to perform an AD sync every night.  For some reason, in SharePoint her name continues to show the old last name (Smith).

Attempt to Resolve
We used PowerShell to determine where all she had privileges and it was in only two groups: Member of one group, Visitor in another. So we removed her account in SharePoint via PowerShell.  Then, when I went to manually add her back to the two groups, I used the PeoplePicker to find her.  She was there correctly (Jones).  So I selected her, then Add, only to find her display name incorrectly rendering as Smith.   Since AD is correct it has to be SharePoint caching this somewhere, I reasoned.

Solution
To make this quick, the user at this forum thread had the exact same problem.  After much back and forth, this is the correct solution submitted by one Mayur Joshi:

Let’s do this, hit the below URL 

http://{SiteCollectionURL}/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

Look for the user that has old name, select the checkbox, click on Actions -> Delete User From Site Collection. 

Make sure to note the parameter of MembershipGroudId=0.  (That’s a “zero”, by the way.)

Happily, this solution resolved the issue for us.  Thank you Mayur… and Google.

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Posted in SharePoint 2010 by Doug Comments Off on Display Name will not Update