I see there are threads on this dating back to 2009 and was wondering if there are more recent developments.

When adding a new custom field, I often add it to Task, Story, Epic, and Defect. Therefore I need to "Synchronize Attributes" on all open work items. This is generally done manually by running an "all open items" query, selecting all items in the query with control-a, then right-clicking on the Type column and choosing "Synchronize Attributes". That worked fine in the beginning, but we have too many open work items now. I increased query results to 5000 work items, but selecting this many work items and running "Synchronize Attributes" results in "Error running operation 'Synchronizing Attributes'" after about 10 minutes. Thus I have to resort to using ID ranges to break the query into smaller pieces. This makes the process of manually synchronizing attributes quite the pain.

So I would really like to be able to tell the server to run the attribute sync at night. Is this possible yet, or is it still only a client-side manual process?