There is a new Active Directory / Microsoft Entra ID (or Entra Active Directory) migration sheriff in town, and it is sporting lots of new improvements – Power Sync Pro.
There are several improvements above and beyond any of the myriad of tools I have used in the past, and since I have been doing AD migrations since 2001, I have seen a lot.
In a series of articles posted here, I will enumerate some of those never-before-seen features and improvements. However, for this article, I will start with the most fundamental shift in the migration approach, which is the required “What If” step before any object changes can be made.
The “What If” in Power Sync Pro?
The “What If” step in Power Sync Pro leverages its built-in metaverse to give attribute-level details of the changes that will be made if the step is accepted. That statement might sound simple, but it is revolutionary in the migration world. In the past, for all migrations, you had to run the initial object sync and then just see what happened. If it was wrong, then hopefully you had an object-level restore capability to fix whatever got broken. No more!
Now, before you can move forward, you must review the object change report. It is even downloadable in CSV form for easy searching and sorting. Now, before you hit that initial sync, you have a chance to even get a signoff, if you like, from your customer!
As mentioned, this is a REQUIRED step. However, like everything in Power Sync Pro’s Interface, it is easy to get to, read through, accept (or not) the work, and enable ongoing synchronization. If you make a change to your sync process it will, once again, mark the job as needing a What If review before it makes new changes. There is no need to rely on a pricey AD backup tool to fix things if it goes wrong.
But what if you accept it and run it, and it still isn’t right? Things can get missed. Remember that downloaded report? The What If report shows you, for each object, for each attribute, what the value was and what it changed to. It wouldn’t be hard to pop out a PowerShell script to revert the changes. So even in an “oops” moment, you have an easy backout built right into the tool.
The “What If” requirement is a fundamental change to the Active Directory (AD) / Microsoft Entra ID (Microsoft Entra ID) or Entra Active Directory landscape. This is one of the biggest evolutions in migration tools I have seen in well over 20 years. This is a game-changer.
The What If Report
What If Report Example Output
| Attributes | |||
| Attribute | Source Value | Existing Target Value | Future Target Value |
| userPrincipalName | PSPTest1@coherence.corp | PSPTest1@in.pointresolve.org |
