SDS Out of Sync

[John Rorke]

I made the mistake earlier on of clicking the "Refresh Sync" button - this had an effect very different from what I understood it to be. (This has since been renamed to "Reset Sync"). As a result, I now have students who have changed classes now listed in both classes (old and new) instead of just their new class. Needless to say, this has been causing quite a bit of confusion with teachers and students having them listed in both classes. Is there a way I can force SDS to "true-up" the student class rosters with our current assignments? I believe we'll be good going forward, but I need to know how to correct this without affecting current classes. Do we know what the "Reset Sync" button does now? Thanks!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for calling this out John. We are looking for a better way to describe and direct how to use "Sync reset". Conversation like this on this forum are very valuable to us to help identify areas of confusion and hear ideas how to improve. Reset Sync is an option on an SDS sync profile which allows you to stop sync on the current profile, discard any previous sync snapshot which would be used run a delta comparisons against, and restarts sync with a full synchronization cycle based on the current source directory. This option should be used with caution. Below are the common scenarios to use and not use this feature: Use Reset Sync if: • You need to restart a sync profile which is quarantined and no longer running • You’ve found that objects are missing in Azure and need to be recreated by SDS (i.e. Section/O365 Group was inadvertently deleted). Don’t use Reset Sync if: • You need SDS to process delta roster changes recently made in your source directory. SDS will not make updates based on a previous sync, as the previous snapshot will be discarded under this option. (i.e. students have been removed from some classes in the source directory, and SDS hasn’t removed them yet. Hitting reset sync prior to their normal removal will not remove them when it runs the next cycle, because it can’t process the delta membership removal without comparing against the previous sync snapshot. SDS only creates objects and add memberships on a first time sync, and will only process roster/membership removals on delta sync when SDS can compare the current class roster with the previously synced roster) For anyone still facing this issue, you could use PowerShell to process the desired membership removals, and “true-up” the student class rosters, and then use SDS to maintain the memberships from that point forward. Thanks, Matt

[#3]

Thanks Matt, this helps a lot! Do you have documentation on the PowerShell script you can point me to for the "true-up"? Understanding this, I think we'll be good going forward, but I'd still like to clean-up the removals that are still in there.

[#4]

We have a script on our GitHub repository called Remove-All_Section_Memberships.ps1. That will remove all memberships for SDS created groups. https://github.com/OfficeDev/O365-EDU-Tools