Hello RDMers,
We all have our pet peeves, and one of my biggest pet peeves has to be doing my change of address when moving. I swear it is one of the biggest reasons I won’t move! It will drive anyone nuts: did you make the change for your car, for your insurance, for your banks, for the government….Shouldn’t there be a way to synchronize all of this, and kill two birds with one stone? Well, we haven’t figured that one out yet, but we have figured out how to synchronize Remote Desktop Manager list of sessions with an external source! That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind (ok, maybe not that giant of a leap!).
We have been offering synchronizers for quite a while, but we have recently made some improvements to the Active Directory Synchronizer. Moreover, since we often have questions about it, we decided it was time to take a closer look at it.
The synchronizers are a category of entries that maintain Remote Desktop Manager in sync with an external source. Specifically, it will create sessions from the external data source. Our current synchronizers are Active Directory, CSV file, Spiceworks and ScreenConnects.
The AD Synchronizer creates sessions from a whole domain or a specific OU container. When creating your synchronizer session, you will notice the option to Synchronize automatically, that check box is selected by default. You might be wondering if the domains re-sync periodically in the background or every time somebody launches the application? Well, if the auto-sync feature is enabled, there will be a sync done 30 seconds after each data source refresh. If you would prefer to run your sync manually, you just have to uncheck that option, but remember that by doing so, you will now have to double-click on the synchronizer to have it run.
A quick little trick here, using the command line shortcut feature that exists in ALL of our sessions, we could easily imagine creating a batch file with all of the synchronizers you mean to run and have it scheduled to run periodically. You see, easy as pie!
One of the requests we kept getting from our wonderful RDMers community is the ability to delete connections that no longer exist in Active Directory. If you take a look at the advanced tab of your AD Synchronizer entry, you will notice the Action on entry mismatch option. From now on, you can choose to move or delete entries that do not match anymore, provided that the entry was created by the synchronizer. You can check if an entry was created by a synchronizer by looking in the entry’s advanced tab under Creation source.
If you have selected the Root mode in your AD Synchronizer Search tab, the Action on mismatch will verify the whole data source, which means if you have an entry with the same type (RDP) and with the same host, it will not import that AD entry. If you have selected the Destination Group mode instead, it will only check for entries with the same type and same host in that group and its subgroups, but not in the rest of the data source.
We really hope this will help you understand our AD synchronizer a little bit better, and also, we hope we listened well and delivered exactly what our community asked for!
As always, please let us know your thoughts by using the comment feature of the blog. You can also visit our forums to get help and submit feature requests, you can find them here.