Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Contact Syncronization

Syncing contacts in any version of Servicedesk has been an inherit problem. A search of contacts in my company's current Servicedesk environment would yield a good number of duplicates, active records for employees no longer with the company, and stale contact information. Reasons such is this is why my company decided to start fresh, moving no data from R6 to R11.

Our solution to syncing contact data? A little console app I wrote that is aptly named 'Servicedesk Contact Sync'. The app features...
  • Initial load of contacts from an LDAP source.
    The search to LDAP can be pointed to a specific OU or to the RootDSE. Also supports nested OU's.
  • Updates contacts already in Servicedesk.
    The app can be run as a background service that will compare information in Servicedesk to LDAP users and update where needed. This includes users that are disabled in LDAP, it will set the contact to inactive in Servicedesk.
  • Exclusions list.
    Allows for exclusion of users in LDAP. This is handy if you have service accounts that need to be excluded from addition/sync in servicedesk.
  • Supports multiple versions of Servicedesk.
    Supports R6, R11, and soon to support R12.
  • Extensive logging
Again, I will be posting the app for beta use and am open to suggestions.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Kristy,

I would love to see the app released! Any news on the progress? I also follow this in the servicedeskusers forum: http://www.servicedeskusers.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2221

Cheers,
Peakation

Unknown said...

I am currently following a manual sync procedure using csv files and would love to have a console application. Would be looking forward for this app.

Michael said...

Any way I can test this tool in our Service Desk environment? Would solve a lot of our issues. Many thanks!