I am curious to get feedback on potential avenues I can take to accomplish an AD synch and Employee Lookup in a WSS 3 environment. The first requirement is to synch AD to WSS 3. I initally set out to update a contact list and achieved this through third party tools that I have trialed. The contact list would than be the source of a employee lookup. That I presume would be a custom webpart.

The next requirement is that out infrastructure team wants to manually control the updating of employee records on the AD database. Therefore a wortkflow would be required.

One of my major questions is can this be achieved if the target was the user profile list rather than a List? Perhaps I can have two targets and keep them in synch. From what I am hearing editing the user profile list is not that easy. In addition I would have to add a link to kick off the wkflow. The list would be easier to control in this case.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Paul