Expanding on Person field in SharePoint (after user has left and returned to organisation)

[Anonymous]

I have a SP List with a Person field. However, when that person has left the business and returned again, PBI cannot expand that Person field to return the details of the user i.e. name, email address etc.

The returned result is null, which causes issues with the broader report.

I suspect it is because when the person has returned to the organisation, they are re-using the old email address, but under a new windows/user account.

The fix is to remove the existing entry of John Smith in the person field, and then add it back again. However, this requires diagnosing and troubleshooting - not something that an end-user should be expected to do.

Anyone have any experience or solutions here?

EXAMPLE:

An SP List exists with John Smith (john.smith@email.com) in the person field

- John Smith leaves the business, but John Smith still appears in the list

- Report works fine as it pulls the details of the user that has left the business

- John Smith returns to the business under a new user account, but re-uses the john.smith@email.com address

- PBI cannot expand on the Person field, as it does not know which account to retrieve (the old account or the new account)

- PBI returns 'null' instead

- The fix is to remove 'John Smith' from the person field, and re-add it again - which resolves the issue

[v-jingzhang]

Hi @Anonymous 

There is an automatically created unique id for every user in Active Directory. If you remove an account and add a new one with the same name again, it will generate a new unique id for the new account instead of using the old user id. This new account will not be linked to the user information and contents related to the old account. So you need to remove the account from the person field and re-add it again. 

Below description is extracted from this document

• After a user account has been deleted, all permissions and memberships that are associated with that user account are permanently deleted. Because the security identifier (SID) for each account is unique, a new user account with the same name as a previously deleted user account does not automatically assume the permissions and memberships of the previously deleted account. If you want to duplicate a deleted user account, you must recreate all permissions and memberships manually.

I cannot come up with other solutions. 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing
If this post helps, please Accept it as Solution to help other members find it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply Jing.

I understand that the user account info is removed and each user is unique.

The issue is the 'historical' user details cannot be retrieved, even though a SharePoint list shows the name of the historical user.

Example:

• Jing Zhang is a user in a company, with username 'jzhang1'
• A SharePoint list has a Person field - with Jing Zhang listed in a row/record
• When PowerBI expands on this field, we can retrieve the name, username and email of this person e.g. jzhang1, jing.zhang@company.com
• If Jing Zhang leaves the company, the SharePoint list still shows 'Jing Zhang' under the record
• PowerBI can still expand on the person field and retrieve Jing Zhang's email address and username e.g. 'jzhang1', jing.zhang@company.com 

This is normal and expected behaviour

Complication:

• Jing Zhang returns to the company (6 months later), and they provide him a new user account 'jzhang2' and re-use the old email address with this new user account (jing.zhang@company.com)
• The SharePoint list still has the record where the person is Jing Zhang
• When PowerBI attempts to expands on this field, it returns null

Suspected cause:

• I believe this is because the email address has now been re-assigned to the new user account, (i.e. jing.zhang@company.com has been reassigned from user account 'jzhang1 to 'jzhang2'
• This means SharePoint is unsure which account to retrieve details, or, because jzhang1 user account is no longer 'active' or exists 
• However, please note, the SharePoint list still shows the original 'Jing Zhang' listed as the person under the record

The problem is being able to expand the Person field for that particular record, where the user account is no longer active, and email has been re-assigned to a new user account.

The ideal solution is that when expanding the Person field, it will still return 'Jing Zhang', and the email address jing.zhang@company.com

I hope this explains it clearly enough.

The issue would be a greater if the email address was being re-assigned to a user account to a entirely different individual . e.g. a new employee joins the company who also is named Jing Zhang, and they re-assign the email to this new employee. We would not want the original record to be pointing to the new individual, as that is not correct.