How Active Directory Users and Contacts are Synchronized with Your Device

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How Active Directory Users and Contacts are Synchronized with Your Device

IT Hit Active Directory Address Book CardDAV Server can synchronizes all user and contacts data stored on multiple Active Directory domains in the entire Active Directory tree. The Global Catalog stores only small amount of contacts data and does not allow updates making it unusable for contacts synchronization. Instead of extracting contacts from Global Catalog, the IT Hit AD Address Book queries Active Directory servers directly getting all contacts data including the one that is not stored in Global Catalog. You can point your device to synchronize contacts from entire Active Directory subtree, from a single domain or from a particular Active Directory container. All you need it to discover the required connection URL.

Synchronizing Contacts Data from Multiple Active Directory Domains

Here is how the initial synchronization works:

  1. IT Hit AD Address Book CardDAV Server queries Global Catalog to discover all contacts that needs to be synchronized.
  2. The Server finds domain servers DNS names that store contacts data. If required, DNS names are mapped to names or IP addresses specified in the config file.
  3. The Server queries each domain server directly to get complete contacts data.

Your AD servers and IT Hit AD Address Book CardDAV Server can reside in a separate network, all you need is to specify in the configuration file how your AD servers should be found.

To keep track of contacts modifications a CardDAV client will keep eTag for each contact. To synchronize the modified contacts the CardDAV client will first query contacts eTags from IT Hit AD Address Book CardDAV Server and then will query contacts data only for contacts with modified eTags. The IT Hit AD Address Book Server will request contact data for contacts that are modified from a particular AD server and return it to CardDAV client.