Replacing GCDS with GAM?

[Jörgen Rignell]

Hi everyone! New to GAM and looking for some info. This is my environment right now:

Two Google Workspace for Education Plus domains - one for student and one for staff.
A local on-prem Active Directory primary catalog for students and staff.

GCDS set up for syncing only Shared Contacts. AD students to GW staff domain and vice versa.

Now I am about to move from on-prem ad to Azure AD, Azure AD is provisioning users to GW student domain and to GW staff domain.

Now I am looking for a new solution to sync users as shared contacts and thinking about using GAM for that.

I am thinking about using csv files to add and remove shared contacts to/from my two GW domains with the use of GAM, my first question is, do I need two csv files, one for adding contacts and one for removing contacts, or is the contacts syncing only with one csv file, if a student no longer exists in the csv file, is that student removed?

Or am I on the wrong track here?

Please guide me if anyone have some experience like my case?!

[Kim Nilsson]

Hi, Jörgen!

Currently there is no sync domain shared contacts option..

It would certainly be awesome to have one.

You mention two csv files, for adding and removing contacts.

How will you even know which contacts to put in the removeContacts.csv file?

That's the magic GCDS does in the background, compares the contacts in AD with those in Workspace.

It will take a python wizard to be able to do that comparison.

gam can easily export the users from Domain A, and then export the current Domain Shared Contacts from Domain B, but currently there's no code to compare those lists. So you will not know which users to add nor remove.

Last I read, if you push/create the same list of contacts again, there's a risk you will end up with duplicate contacts.

[Kim Nilsson]

(whispers - I know there's such a wizard close by, and we'll see what happens)

[Jörgen Rignell]

Thanks for your reply Kim!

I really like the magic in GCDS and would like to keep using that, but I am not sure if I can do that when moving from on-prem AD to Azure AD?

I have been discussing my issues with Björn and he mentioned your name, that you might be the wizard I am looking for ;-)

About the csv, I was wondering if it works like the csv used for Apple School Manager, if I remove a user from that csv it gets deleted from ASM automatically at the next sync, but from your saying it looks like it does not have the same feature...correct?!

[Kim Nilsson]

No, GCDS is currently only built to work with on-prem AD.

GAMADV-XTD3 often has sync options, but not with create/delete users.

But, if you use a Google Sheet as the csv source you could have a column for Create/Delete, and have your scripts act accordingly.