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Collaboration Services 3.10.1 - User Guide

Getting started with Collaboration Services Organizing objects for synchronization Resolving synchronization conflicts Managing the synchronization process Transport management Fine-tuning and maintenance Backup, restore, and troubleshooting Appendix A: Customizing the format of synchronized data Appendix B: Collaboration Services events

Resolving synchronization conflicts

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What can cause synchronization conflicts?
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How can conflicts be resolved?
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Automatic conflict resolution
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Manual conflict resolution
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Matching rules viewer utility

What can cause synchronization conflicts?

A conflict occurs when two or more objects from different forests have the same email address. Most conflicts are due to manually-created contacts pointing to users in other forests.

While creating a stub object in the target forest, Collaboration Services populates the proxyAddresses attribute and the mail attribute of the stub with the appropriate attribute values of the corresponding source object. However, if existing contacts or other objects already have their properties populated with the same values, a valid stub object cannot be created.

Therefore, before creating a stub, Collaboration Services checks whether any of the proxy addresses or mail attributes of the existing forest objects are already populated with the same values as the attribute planned for a stub object. If a conflict is detected, Collaboration Services cannot create a stub object until the conflict is resolved.

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NOTE: Collaboration Services is not capable of automatically resolving conflicts when there is more than one conflicting object; resolving conflicts involving more objects requires administrator intervention. Information about every conflict found during synchronization is recorded in the Collaboration Services log.

How can conflicts be resolved?

There are several different ways to resolve a conflict, object deletion, object matching, and pre-matching.

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Object Deletion
The recommended method of resolving conflicts is to delete the conflicting object and create a stub object that inherits deleted object’s properties. This is the simplest way to resolve conflicts, and it is the only option available for resolving conflicts between objects of different classes (for example, user and contact).
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Object Matching
If both the conflicting object and the published object are of the same class (for example, both are users), then you can choose to match the published object into the existing one. In this case, the existing object is used as a stub for the time of synchronization. One significant difference between such a "temp stub" object and a regular stub object is that the user object’s account state remains unchanged. For example, if the account was enabled, it remains enabled after Collaboration Services makes a stub of it.
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NOTE: Matching needs to be used for deployment scenarios where some users have active user accounts in multiple forests. With matching, you can use active user accounts as stubs, so the users will still be able to log on in multiple forests with Collaboration Services deployed.
You can define attribute synchronization rules for matching published objects with existing objects. The rules allow you to specify which attributes of the matched objects should be overwritten by the published object’s attributes and which should be left intact.
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NOTE: Attribute synchronization is useful if the user account is updated by the provisioning system in one of the forests and those changes need to be propagated to the same user’s accounts in other forests.
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Pre-Matching
This method instructs Collaboration Services to match published objects into specified objects automatically in the selected OUs.

Forest administrators can configure Collaboration Services to handle conflicts using the following options: deletion, matching, and pre-matching. For that, the automation rules should be configured, and then the synchronization service will attempt to automatically resolve every conflict it encounters according to these rules.

Automatic conflict resolution

To set up automatic conflict resolution
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Open the Collaboration Services Properties dialog box, select Synchronization | Automation, and then select the conflict resolution method you need.
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