Configure People Picker to get users from domains

Some Points on User Profiles and People Picker

People Picker and UPS are not related. People Picker is used to select users for authentication and to assign permissions to them.  Profiles are used to store information to enrich the user experience.

A user profile consists of a set of user properties. User Profiles stores users’ information and are used to My Sites, Profile pages, People searching, Organizational charts, Expertise search, Social tagging and Audiences.

The People Picker gets its info directly from AD.  It will get users from the domain that the SharePoint server accounts are in. If Sync is configure then User Profiles are populated from AD, but that's not a requirement

The AD import option does not perform bidirectional synchronization. Changes made to SharePoint user profiles will not be synchronized back to the domain controller

To add additional AD domains they must be in Trust relationship with the domain that SharePoint is using.  Then you can configure it with PowerShell.  This article has the information.  Its for SP2013, but the settings are the same in 2016.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg602075.aspx

Script to give people picker Search Domain users

There are two ways can give access .  through sts adm and PowerShell way.

Please make sure you are have an application credential key need to generated  in each web front end and that should be unique across each web front end.

Below is the command to generate application credential key through PowerShell

$key = ConvertTo-SecureString "Password1" -AsPlainText -Force

[Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSecurity]::SetApplicationCredentialKey($key)

 Stsadm command

To see the existing settings. Here assume http://teamsites.domain1.com as the web application name.

Stsadm -o getproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests –url  http://teamsites.domain1.com

To set the search domain

STSADM.EXE -o SetProperty -pn PeoplePicker-SearchADForests -pv "Forest:argous,domain1\svc-sp-admin,PWD;Forest:domain2.local,domain2\svc-sp-admin,PWD" -URL http://teamsites.domain1.com

PowerShell script

$wa= Get-SPWebApplication http://teamsites.domain1.com

$wa.PeoplePickerSettings.SearchActiveDirectoryDomains.clear()

$adsearchobj1 = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPeoplePickerSearchActiveDirectoryDomain

$userpassword1 = ConvertTo-SecureString "PWD" -AsPlainText -Force

$adsearchobj1.DomainName = "ARGOUS"

$adsearchobj1.LoginName ="domain1\svc-sp-admin"

$adsearchobj1.IsForest = $true

$adsearchobj1.SetPassword($userpassword1)

$wa.PeoplePickerSettings.SearchActiveDirectoryDomains.Add($adsearchobj1)

$wa.Update()

$adsearchobj = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPeoplePickerSearchActiveDirectoryDomain

$userpassword = ConvertTo-SecureString "PWD" -AsPlainText -Force

$adsearchobj.DomainName = "domain2.local"

$adsearchobj.ShortDomainName ="domain2"

$adsearchobj.IsForest = $true

$adsearchobj.LoginName ="domain2\svc-sp-admin"

$adsearchobj.SetPassword($userpassword)

$wa.PeoplePickerSettings.SearchActiveDirectoryDomains.Add($adsearchobj)

$wa.Update()