Active Roles 7.5 - Synchronization Service Administration Guide

• About automated password synchronization
• Steps to automate password synchronization
• Managing Capture Agent
• Managing password sync rules
• Fine-tuning automated password synchronization

If your enterprise environment has multiple data management systems, each having its own password policy and dedicated user authentication mechanism, you may face one or more of the following issues:

• Because users have to remember multiple passwords, they may have difficulty managing them. Some users may even write down their passwords. As a result, passwords can be easily compromised.
• Each time users forget one or several of their numerous access passwords, they have to ask administrators for password resets. This increases operational costs and translates into a loss of productivity.
• There is no way to implement a single password policy for all of the data management systems. This too impacts productivity, as users have to log on to each data management system separately in order to change their passwords.

With Synchronization Service, you can eliminate these issues and significantly simplify password management in an enterprise environment that includes multiple data management systems.

Synchronization Service provides a cost-effective and efficient way to synchronize user passwords from an Active Directory domain to other data systems used in your organization. As a result, users can access other data management systems using their Active Directory domain password. Whenever a user password is changed in the source Active Directory domain, this change is immediately and automatically propagated to other data systems, so each user password remains in sync in the data systems at all times.

You need to connect Synchronization Service to the data systems in which you want to synchronize passwords through special connectors supplied with Synchronization Service.

To automatically synchronize passwords from an Active Directory domain to another data system, complete these steps:

1. Install Capture Agent on each domain controller in the Active Directory domain you want to be the source for password synchronization operations.

   Capture Agent tracks changes to the user passwords in the source Active Directory domain and provides this information to Synchronization Service, which in turn synchronizes passwords in the target connected systems you specify.

   For more information on how to install Capture Agent, see Managing Capture Agent.

2. Connect the Synchronization Service to the Active Directory domain where you installed Capture Agent in step 1.

   Alternatively, you can configure a connection to Active Roles that manages the source Active Directory domain.

3. Connect the Synchronization Service to the data system where you want to synchronize user object passwords with those in the source Active Directory domain.
   • For some target data systems (such as SQL Server) you must specify the data you want to participate in the password synchronization by configuring an SQL query.
   • If the target data system is an LDAP directory service accessed via the generic LDAP connector, you must specify the target object type for which you want to synchronize passwords and the attribute where you want to store object passwords.
4. Ensure that user objects in the source Active Directory domain are properly mapped to their counterparts in the target connected system.

   For more information about mapping objects, see Mapping objects.

   Synchronization Service automatically maps objects between the source Active Directory domain and the target connected system if you configure sync workflows to manage the creation and deprovision operations between the source AD domain (or Active Roles that manages that domain) and the target connected system.

   For more information on sync workflows, see Synchronizing identity data.

5. Create a password synchronization rule for the target connected system.

   For more information, see Creating a password sync rule.

After you complete the above steps, the Synchronization Service starts to automatically track user password changes in the source AD domain and synchronize passwords in the target connected system.

If necessary, you can fine-tune the password synchronization settings by completing these optional tasks:

• Modify the default Capture Agent settings.
• For more information, see Configuring Capture Agent.
• Modify the default Synchronization Service settings related to password synchronization.
• For more information, see Configuring Synchronization Service.
• Specify a custom certificate for encrypting the password sync traffic between the Capture Agent and the Synchronization Service. By default, a built-in certificate is used for this purpose.
• For more information, see Specifying a custom certificate for encrypting password sync traffic.
• Configure the Synchronization Service to automatically run your PowerShell script after the password synchronization completes.

  For more information, see Using PowerShell scripts with password synchronization.

Capture Agent is required to track changes to the user passwords in the Active Directory domain you want to be the authoritative source for password synchronization operations. To synchronize passwords, you must install Capture Agent on each domain controller in the source Active Directory domain.

Whenever a password changes in the source Active Directory domain, the agent captures that change and provides the changed password to the Synchronization Service. In turn, the Synchronization Service uses the provided information to synchronize passwords in the target connected systems according to your settings.

In this section:

• Installing Capture Agent manually
• Using Group Policy to install Capture Agent
• Uninstalling Capture Agent