If you have something boring/repetitive to do then Powershell is your friend! I needed to do this for a client that’s replacing their Office365/Azure AD MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) with Duo.
Solution
Connect to your Microsoft Services Online, i.e. Office365/Azure, using your administrative credentials with the following command;
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Connect-MsolService
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Then (Note: I’ve got more than 1000 users so I need to add the MaxResults switch).
I’m doing some work for a client that has Azure AD Sync running, and we keep kicking each other off the server, so I thought I’d login with another account. However, when I tried to open the Synchronisation Service Manager;
Unable to connect to the Synchronisation Service
Some possible reasons are:
1) The service is not started.
2) Your account is not a member of the requires security group.
See the Synchronisation Service documentation for details.
Solution
Well it was the second option in my case. Open Server Manager > Tools > Computer Management > System tools > Local Users and groups > Groups > ADSyncAdmins > Add your user in here.
Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links
If you are using Azure AD Connect, (AAD Connect) to sync your on-premise Active Directory with Azure AD (i.e. for Office 365), then there may be times when you need to manually ‘force a replication’ because by default it’s going to take 30 minutes between each normal ‘delta replication’
Solution
If you are directly on the server that’s running Azure AD connect, then use the following PowerShell. If you Don’t know which server is running AD connect the see the following link;
Firstly you need to add in the correct module, (you only have to do this once). Though the module should be already installed on the Sync server, let’s not tempt fate and check. (You can also use Get-Module to view installed modules).
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Import-Module ADSync
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Note: If you get an error you may need to run Import-Module “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Azure AD Sync\Bin\ADSync\ADSync.psd1”
Then to Manually Force a Synchronisation;
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To Perform a FULL Sync
Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Initial
To Perform a (Normal) Delta Sync
Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta
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You can view the Sync settings with;
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Get-ADSyncScheduler
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But I don’t like that, I prefer to watch synchronisations going on on the ‘Syntonisation Service Manager’ console, you can spot and troubleshoot errors in here also 🙂
Note: To Troubleshoot Sync errors, see the procedure I use in the following post;
