The customer had secured the services of a delivery partner to provide an AD migration service using Quest Software’s Migration Manager for Active Directory tool. An important aspect of migration was the use of attribute pairs to be utilised during synchronisation. Generally, the attribute pairs extensionattribute14 and extensionattribute15 are used extensively during a synchronization.
In this instance extensionattribute15 was not available and an alternative attribute was required. The customer nominated a picture attribute during a formal meeting, was agreed to, logged and the project continued to progress.
Using the two agreed attributes the AD Migration commenced successfully but failed 15 minutes into the migration during the Synchronization Service. Each time it was restarted, it failed. To make matters difficult there was nothing in the logs to identify the issue . This issue was unresolved for 2 weeks.
The customer was working with Zigabyte on another unrelated product and in hope asked if we could review the MMAD issue. The issue of attribute type was identified immediately. Simply synchronisation attributes MUST be text attributes and usually an UTF-8 character string. The picture attribute provided by the customer is a binary attribute and cannot be used.
The issue was resolved following Zigabyte’s recommendation, and the Migration proceeded as expected.