Issue with adding users using Claims

Question

Hello,
We have a SharePoint 2013 environment. We just introduced a third party claims provider. Before I ha a script that would provision a site collections and in the process add a user as a secondary site collection admin (script1). That was working just fine.
However, since we no longer user classic claim my script is now failing. I tried tweaking it by looking up the user's claims ID and plug it in the script but that is now working (script 2). Any idea how to get around this hurdle?
Thanks
script 1
$siteurl = http://mysite
$siteCollectionUrl = $siteurl
$site =new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteCollectionUrl)
$web = $site.RootWeb
$secondayAdministrator = $web.EnsureUser("domain\username")
$site.SecondaryContact = $secondayAdministrator
Script 2
$siteurl = http://mysite
$siteCollectionUrl = $siteurl
$site =new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($siteCollectionUrl)
$web = $site.RootWeb
$secondayAdministrator = $web.EnsureUser("i:0?.t|claim|domain\username")
$site.SecondaryContact = $secondayAdministrator

Answer 1

Hi Mike,
As you are using third party claim provider in SharePoint, then we cannot use the user name in the format domain\username when calling the EnsureUser API.
To be safe, we need to get the encoded claim value for the user and pass that into the EnsureUser method. 
Please check the PowerShell script below:
$claim = New-SPClaimsPrincipal -Identity domain\username -IdentityType WindowsSamAccountName
$web.EnsureUser($claim.ToEncodedString());
More reference:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2013/02/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-using-ensureuser-in-claims-based-web-apps-in-sharepoint-2010-and-sharepoint-2013.aspx
Best regards.
Thanks
Victoria Xia
TechNet Community Support