After you define and assign your implementation team roles and responsibilities, and determine the communication needs that drive how you use Zinc, you can easily create user accounts and Groups by linking your Zinc Organization to your external directories and using Active Directory sync, either via Azure or Okta. To use external directory sync, contact ServiceMax Support for an authorization token that you then use to create your Zinc instance in your external directory.

When users in your external directory are synced with Zinc, users created in or removed from those directories are created in or removed from Zinc. You can also remove users synced from your external directory in the Admin Console, but if they remain in the corresponding external directory, they are added back in during subsequent sync operations. Similarly, when groups in your external directory are synced with Zinc, groups created in or removed from those directories are also created in or removed from Zinc, and when their memberships change in your external directory, the same changes appear in your Zinc Groups. You cannot delete or rename synced Groups or make any membership changes within Zinc, and you must complete all such Group administrative tasks in the relevant directory.

In the Official Groups tab of the Admin Console, the default Folder location for Groups configured in your external directories and synced to Zinc is External Directory Groups. You can select a different default Folder on the main Settings tab of the Zinc Admin Console. When you delete groups from your external directory, their corresponding Zinc Groups remain intact as unlinked Groups with their current members and Administrators. You can then delete these groups from Zinc after they become unlinked Official Groups. In the Admin Console, when you unlink synced Groups from your external directory, they remain intact in Zinc as Official Groups and are no longer synced.

If you unlink your external directory from your Zinc instance, users and Groups that have already been synced remain intact, and sync is terminated. The synced Groups are no longer updated, but remain in Zinc as uneditable linked Groups.