Managing and Viewing a Specific User’s Memberships in SharePoint

Today's Task: Find all memberships related to a specific user in SharePoint.

Still searching? I'll give you a hint… you cannot list all memberships related to a specific user in SharePoint. That's right. SharePoint does not have the capability to perform a simple look-up to list a user's memberships.

Initial Solution

After some searching, I could find only a few references to listing users memberships. The initial solution (scroll to end of post) was to run a SQL query directly from the database:

declare @RecordId int

select @RecordId = RecordId 

from dbo.UserProfile_Full 

where PreferredName = ‘<<preferred name here>>’ 

exec dbo.QuickLinksRetrieveAllItems @RecordId,@ViewerItemSecurity=31,@RequestedItemSecurity=16

Final Solution

Once again, I did some pondering and figured there must be a more elegant solution. I headed on over to CodePlex and after several searches finally came across a new project: MOSS Manage user membership feature

Not only can I now view all memberships of any user, but I can also manage them as well! I've tested out the feature in a couple of test environments and am extremely happy with the results. The following is a screen shot of the new application page in my MOSS virtual environment:

I'm still a bit amazed that this functionality isn't built-into SharePoint...

Enjoy!