Hey @mmetr this actually came up in the global Gainsight admin slack community recently.

This is was the explanation that was sent from Gainsight to @TMaier to explain it.

link to the community if you’re interested in joining as well: http://bit.ly/gsadminslack

One outstanding issue that this creates, and some additional findings and thoughts. Spoiler alert: I still do not have a perfect answer.

• Remapping the identifier on SFDC User Sync jobs to something other than username (SFDC User ID seems ideal to me, too) is critical to avoid profile duplication in the inevitable instance of name changes, domain changes, etc.
• The availability and accuracy of Connector associations in the User Management section is really important if you have mixed hybrid (SFDC) and direct-to-NXT login methods. You can only change another user’s notification preferences if you first filter to a Connector, and in some cases users with the SFDC preference set who do NOT log in via the SFDC app will experience dead-end notification links until you change it to NXT URLs.
• Somehow, in the org I’m currently managing, Gainsight User records were still being updated with SFDC User ID’s before we changed the mapping. I vaguely suspect that the “avatar” bridge object IS actually filling that out on User via some kind of backend lookup magic, because I checked and there are no other rules etc which could have been doing it.

The last point requires further research / confirmation, but if it works the way I suspect that it does, the ideal scenario would be to leave the SFDC User ID mapping on the avatar object and switch your sync identifier to that field. I would not do this without testing and confirmation, though, since the blowback on having a bad sync identifier is pretty large.

@mmetr or @TMaier Any other findings or information on this? There’s almost nothing about this in Support documentation.

You are correct, there’s not a lot of info and unfortunately I haven’t got anything new to share!

I do believe that part of the backend function of that field is to inform the “Connector” filter lists you find in User Management, so there’s a chance that you would see unusual behavior in that screen were you to change up the mapping. Since that’s not something even an admin is regularly touching, it never came up for me.