Best practice forum (Archived)

Totara Sync

Hi,

Can someone please confirm whether there's any interaction between the 'Password' field in Totara Sync and the 'Generate password and notify user' and 'Force password change' in the user profile.

Our situation is:

we're on V 2.9.XX
our source for user data is via an 'External Database' and it set to auto sync every morning
currently, only employees have an account in Totara
the authentication field for all employees is LDAP
we don't want or need an email to be sent to this group as they use their network credentials. Therefore, the 'Password' field is not included as a field in our Totara Sync.

Very soon, we hope to bring in via the same 'External Database' sync, non employees such as Volunteers. These people and their accounts in Totara:

will need to be set to Manual Account, as the authentication method, which we can do in our data warehouse
'Generate password and notify user' needs to be ticked
'Force password change' needs to be ticked

The points in bold above are the two I'm querying. I want both of these to be ticked during the External Database sync but only for the volunteer accounts, not employee accounts. Would activating the 'Password' field in Totara Sync interact with these fields, and if so, how?

Hope this makes sense.

Michelle

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Hi Michelle,

If the source contains data for users with different authentication types (i.e some manual and some LDAP), the system will detect the authentication method that is set for each user and welcome emails and passwords will only be sent to those users with Manual authentication (even where password is not included). So, in the scenario you've outlined the new users which you add with manual authentication will receive the welcome emails but the LDAP users will not.

This means you can use one source file with users that use different authentication types.

I hope this helps

Tom Wood

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Thanks so much Tom - very helpful.

I was also able to confirm in an old post by someone else that the 'manual' auth users will also be forced to change their password upon initial login, which is great.

Final question on this, what does the value of the Auth field need to be in Totara sync for manual accounts? Is it just the word manual?

Thanks again Tom.

Michelle

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Hi Michelle,

That's correct. Please make sure that all auth methods are in lowercase.

There are some more details on this available in the Authentication section of the help documentation on this subject.

Cheers

Tom

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