Active Sync “listens” or polls for changes to a resource, detecting incremental changes in real time. Because Active Sync is designed to detect changes, it should not be used to load account information into Identity Manager for the first time. Instead, use reconciliation or a discovery process.
In general, you run reconciliation on an Active Sync resource in the following circumstances:
To perform an initial load on the resource.
To detect any attributes that have not been updated in Identity Manager because Active Sync has been configured to ignore or filter out the attributes.
Active Sync differs from reconciliation in the following ways:
Active Sync allows an administrator to specify a user form that ensures attributes across multiple accounts are kept synchronized.
A process rule can be implemented that fully controls all Active Sync processing. This is typically enabled when extraordinary actions need to be performed when an account on a resource changes, such as editing multiple objects in the repository.
Active Sync requires the use of an Active Sync-enabled adapter that has been properly configured. See Business Administrator's Guide for more information about configuring a resource to implement Active Sync.