I ran into a problem with a client where the Site Collection’s user list was missing the email addresses from most of the users so our workflows were not working. Turns out that SharePoint 2010 and 2013 have different setup for the defaults of the User Profile store. In our 2010 environment we went with the out of the box setup for the profile map to AD and so we did the same in setting up 2013. In 2010 the work email field was mapped to the mail property in AD. In 2013 it was mapped to the proxyaddress property. Once we corrected that we needed to refresh the users list. I found an entry that was written for 2010 but the information is still valid for 2013. I thought I would link and share this in case anyone else has the same problem or in case I need to remember how to do this again.
Essentially there are two timer jobs that will sync the user profile data to the sites. They are the User Profile Service Application – User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization(Hourly) and User Profile Service Application – User Profile to SharePoint Quick Synchronization(Every 5 Minutes). The article also mentions a couple stsadm commands that can help if the jobs are failing.
Stsadm.exe –o sync –listolddatabases 0
This will display all the databases and when they were last synced.
Stsadm.exe –o sync –deleteolddatabases 0
This command will delete the old information as if no sync had ever happened. You can then run the full synchronization job to update all the sites.
Here is the source article if you would like more information.
http://donalconlon.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/sharepoint-user-information-list-is-not-being-updated/