How to keep People records in sync between DEV and PROD

Scott Stauffer · ‎11-17-2011

We have RequestCenter setup to automatically create a person's RC profile when they login for the first time. This is causing synchronization problems for us because people records are getting created on DEV and PROD at different times and being assigned different unique ids.

The following scenario illustrates the problem being cause by this:

On PROD
- Suzie's unique ID is 25
- Bob's unique ID is 30
On DEV
- Suzie's unique ID is 30

On DEV, I create a service and set the approver to be Suzie. When I migrate the service to PROD, the approver gets set to Bob because his unique ID on PROD is the same as Suzie's on DEV. So, I have to edit the service on PROD to reset the approver to be Suzie.

The only solution I can think of is to do a periodic service migrate of all people records from PROD to DEV. Migrating 6000 users, however, will take a long time.

Is anyone else having this issue - and if so, how are you dealing with it?

Thanks,
Scott

Ken Komara - Allstate · ‎11-17-2011

We had the same issue at Allstate. To resolve this issue we turned off SSO in DEV. This prevents RC from creating person records in DEV. The only way in which a person can be added is through migration of either the actual person record or when migrating OUs from PROD to DEV.

Ken Komara

Tylor Hagerman · ‎11-17-2011

Couldn't you assign the approval using an expression instead of assigning it to a person object? All of our dynamic approvals work that way where we assign the approval based on their login ID (which is assigned by us and not an auto-generated system ID).

Our approval likes like this:
LOGINNAME=#Service.Data.CMN_APPROVER_MGR.LoginID#

But I don't see why you couldn't do this:
LOGINNAME=12345
(or whatever your user names look like)

That way you're not relying on the p

Report Inappropriate Content · ‎11-17-2011

It is recommended to synchronize all environments in-between development cycles via database copy. We copy down our production database every 3-6 months to reset all of our envionrments...

Emir E · ‎11-17-2011

Scott, we do the same as Charles Schwab and Mariott. Turn off SSO and LDAP in Dev. Move users down as necessary, no need ot have all PROD users in DEV.

We use the same approval logic as Charles Schwab.

eelizabethhammackmarriot · ‎11-17-2011

We migrate backwards too.

Scott Stauffer · ‎11-17-2011

Thanks for all of the great suggestions! I think we're going to start migrating person records from PROD to DEV on a periodic basis.