Using the FaxPress Enterprise Active Directory Synchronizer

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The FaxPress Active Directory Synchronizer can be used to create new FaxPress users from existing Active Directory users. When the Active Directory Synchronizer is executed the first time, it imports Active Directory users from specified groups, and uses them to create new FaxPress Enterprise users and groups. From the second execution on, the Active Directory Synchronizer simply performs an update function. This update function may add or delete users, or modify user properties information.

Active Directory users all have email addresses and display names, so all FaxPress Enterprise user accounts created from Active Directory accounts will contain email addresses and display names, too. Active Directory user accounts without display names or email addresses will still be used to create FaxPress Enterprise user accounts, but will not be recorded in the user mapping data file.

Certain modifications to Active Directory will not be detected by the FaxPress Enterprise. When a user is removed from an existing Active Directory group, but still exists as an individual user in Active Directory, the Synchronizer is unable to detect this kind of modification. This user will remain in its original group on the FaxPress Enterprise. The Active Directory Synchronizer will only delete users from the FaxPress Enterprise if those users are first deleted as individual users from Active Directory.

User Mapping and the Email Gateway Service

After importing Active Directory users to FaxPress Enterprise, the Active Directory Synchronizer automatically creates the User Mapping information required by the FaxPress Enterprise Email Gateway. User mapping will be created whether or not the Email Gateway service is started or stopped.

See your FaxPress Enterprise Email Gateways Guide for more user mapping information.

Configuring the Active Directory Synchronizer

To use the FaxPress Enterprise’s Active Directory Synchronizer service:

To configure the Enterprise’s Active Directory Synchronizer service, follow these steps:

Active Directory Domain Name – displays the name of the FaxPress Enterprise’s domain. You may need to enter a fully qualified domeain name.

Refresh Synchronizer – select to update all user data whether or not any changes have been made.

Schedule – when the Active Directory Synchronizer service is running, (indicated by the Started in the Embedded Services folder in FaxPress Plus) this option will allows you to specify when the Synchronizer should update Enterprise user information with information from Active Directory.

Service Login Account User Name and Password – the Active Directory Synchronizer requires an account with administrator privileges to use to log in as a service to Active Directory. The service account must have Read access to the Active Directory and should be able to get list of users and group and all user information.

FaxPress Administrator Name and Password – enter the Administrator name and password, or the name and password of an account with Administrator privileges. The Synchronizer requires this account to log on to the Enterprise and create or update Enterprise user information with Active Directory information.

Trace to file – select this option to have the Active Directory’s trace file information stored in a subdirectory of the Active Directory folder on the Enterprise.

Selecting the Create a New Profile option modifies the Active Directory schema and requires the User Name entered in the Active Directory Administrator section to have both administrator and schema rights. The profile creation process creates a new schema entry and stores all the configuration settings under this new Schema Object. The schema entries are: fpAttributeMap, fpPrevilegeMap, fpDefaultSettings, fpAdProfile.

Select a Profile From the Following List – This option will only be available if an Active Directory Synchronizer profile has already been created on Active Directory.

Create New Profile – Select this option to create an Active Directory Synchronizer profile that will be available for future use. Once created on Active Directory, the new profile will appear in the Select a Profile From the Following List section, and will be available to any FaxPress Enterprise. Profile names are limited to 60 characters.

Do not create any profile on Active Directory – This allows you to create FaxPress Enterprise users from existing Active Directory users for this session only, without creating a profile for future use. No schema entries are created with this option.

Disabled Active Directory users will not be imported. Also, the Synchronizer only recognizes Active Directory users and groups. It does not recognize Active Directory user containers.

As shown in the above example, four pre-configured, default Active Directory/FaxPress User Attributes mappings:

Enterprise Description = Active Directory description (The AD Synchronizer will only accept the first 13 characters of each user's Description data. Any information following the 13 characters will be truncated.)

Enterprise Fax Number = Active Directory facsimileTelephoneNumber

Enterprise Full Name = Active Directory displayName

Enterprise User Name = Active Directory sAMAccountName

Other mappings can be added as required, e.g.:

Enterprise Voice Number = Active Directory telephoneNumber

The Edit Condition button allows the FaxPress Enterprise to be configured to accommodate anticipated changes to the Active Directory accounts. The Edit Condition button can be used, for example, to specify what might happen to a FaxPress Enterprise User’s account when the Active Directory account expires, as shown below.

The conditions of the default, pre-configured mappings cannot be edited using the Edit Condition button.

The Set FaxPress user password randomly option will assign a unique, randomly generated password to each FaxPress Enterprise user. The user can then customize the assigned password as described in Setting User Passwords – Important.

The Set FaxPress user password to: option allows you to assign one default password for all FaxPress Enterprise users and groups. See Setting User Passwords – Important for more information on passwords.

The Active Directory Synchronizer will not import empty Active Directory groups. To be imported, groups must have at least one user in them.

The Synchronize Now button allows the Synchronizer service to be started, and the synchronization process to be executed, immediately rather than at the time interval specified in the configuration’s General screen. The Synchronize Now button will start, execute, and then stop the Synchronizer service. If the Synchronize Now button is used, the Synchronizer service will always stop after execution, even if the Synchronizer service was running initially.

Return to and use the Synchronize Now button at any time to manually start, synchronize all modified users, and stop the Synchronizer service. This lets you keep the Synchronizer service stopped rather than started after the initial synchronization process, and only use the Synchronizer as needed.

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