UPDATED 30/03/2017 – Adding notification email notifying the activation of the feature
Starting April 19th, a new feature will be available to eliminate frictions caused by duplicate synched attributes.
This feature called Duplicate Attribute Resiliency will authorize objects synchronization and provisioning on Office 365 even if there is a duplicate UPN or ProxyAddresses.
The idea behind is to authorize the creation of the new object even if there is already another synched object with the same value in the UPN and/or ProxyAddresses attributes.
Until then, when there was a duplicate issue, the new object was not created on Office 365 / Azure AD. With this feature the new object with the duplicate value will be provisioned anyway using the following rule:
- if the duplicate attribute is mandatory to provision the object, a temporary value will be set while the duplicate value is quarantine; for example, a temporary UPN value will be set using the format <4 digits>@<yourtenant>.onmicrosoft.com
- if the duplicate attribute is not mandatory, the duplicate value will be quarantined with no temporary value
As of today, you will be notified about this duplicate issue.
Any tenant which got the directory synchronization enabled after August 22nd, 2016 will got the Duplicate Attribute Resiliency feature automatically enabled. All other tenants will get updated in batch at later stage; you will receive a notification email to tell you when this will be activated.
You can also check if the feature is enabled using the PowerShell commands
Get-MsolDirSyncFeatures -Feature DuplicateUPNResiliency
Get-MsolDirSyncFeatures -Feature DuplicateUPNResiliency
Feature Activation Notification email
Hello ,
A new feature called Duplicate Attribute Resiliency is being introduced in order to eliminate friction caused by duplicate UserPrincipalName and ProxyAddress conflicts when running one of Microsoft’s synchronization tools. This new feature is being rolled out across all of Azure Active Directory, and will be enabled for your tenant on 04/19/2017. The new behavior that this feature enables is in the cloud portion of the sync pipeline, therefore it is client agnostic and relevant for any Microsoft synchronization product including Azure AD Connect, DirSync and MIM + Connector. Please read on to learn how this change impacts the way Azure Active Directory handles these specific certain types of Identity synchronization errors.
Current behavior
If there is an attempt to provision a new object with a UPN or ProxyAddress value that violates this uniqueness constraint, Azure Active Directory blocks that object from being created. Similarly, if an object is updated with a non-unique UPN or ProxyAddress, the update fails. The provisioning attempt or update is retried by the sync client upon each export cycle, and continues to fail until the conflict is resolved. An error report email is generated upon each attempt and an error is logged by the sync client.
New Behavior – with Duplicate Attribute Resiliency
- Instead of completely failing to provision or update an object with a duplicate attribute, Azure Active Directory “quarantines" the duplicate attribute which would violate the uniqueness constraint.
- If this attribute is required for provisioning, like UserPrincipalName, the service assigns a placeholder value. The format of these temporary values is “+<4digitnumber>@.onmicrosoft.com".
- If the attribute is not required, like a ProxyAddress, Azure Active Directory simply quarantines the conflict attribute and proceeds with the object creation or update.
- Upon quarantining the attribute, information about the conflict is sent in the same error report email used in the old behavior. However, this info only appears in the error report one time, when the quarantine happens, it does not continue to be logged in future emails. Also, since the export for this object has succeeded, the sync client does not log an error and does not retry the create / update operation upon subsequent sync cycles.
The way all other types of errors are processed remains unchanged, this feature is only relevant for duplicate UserPrincipalName and ProxyAddress conflicts.
To read more about the behavior change along with identifying and resolving conflicts, please see this article: Identity synchronization and duplicate attribute resiliency
Thank you,
The Azure Active Directory Team
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