How does Joinly sync Cegid HR (Meta4) to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in Cegid PeopleNet in the cloud — through Cegid’s REST web service or a scheduled extract — then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. PeopleNet holds the authoritative person and contract record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Cegid PeopleNet. Joinly reads the new person record and its contract, determines the role from work unit, position and country, and instructs the AD Agent to create the user in the correct OU, build the sAMAccountName and UPN from your rules, and add the right security groups — timed to the effective start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes position, work unit or country, Joinly tells the agent to move the user to the matching OU, swap security-group membership and update attributes. Access that no longer fits the new assignment is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job — even across a legal entity or payroll country.

3. Leaver. On the contract end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Because matching is keyed on the person’s unique identifier, a later rehire reuses the same object rather than creating a new one.

Example: A manufacturing group runs Cegid PeopleNet and an on-premise AD across three plants. It hires a maintenance technician with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the dated contract, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Plant-A > Maintenance OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Maintenance-Ops group. When the technician later moves to production planning, the agent moves the object to the new OU and swaps the groups the same day.

What manual AD account management costs

Without automation, every account starts as a Cegid ticket that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Because Cegid Meta4 has no first-party AD connector, the baseline is a scheduled CSV / SFTP extract processed by a script, with limited mapping, no role-to-group logic and no real handling of dated records or multi-country context, so the decisions still fall to people.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for an AD account and group access while a ticket sits in a queue, losing productive days in their first week.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change position or transfer to another country, old security-group membership often stays attached, so people accumulate rights they no longer need.

• Forgotten offboarding. Accounts that aren’t disabled on time are a security and audit risk — and with successive contracts under one person id it is easy to disable an account while a newer contract is still active.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Cegid Meta4 has no first-party AD connector, so the native path is a scheduled extract fed into Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent (or a custom script) that writes to on-premise AD. That’s a transport layer, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a PeopleNet-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Cegid HR (Meta4) to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable at scale.

• sAMAccountName uniqueness and length. AD limits the sAMAccountName to 20 characters and it must be unique across the domain. Joinly builds it from your rules with a fallback pattern, so duplicate names never produce a collision or a truncated, unreadable login.

• OU placement from the org model and country. Work units, work places, jobs and positions — and the country / legal entity — don’t map one-to-one to your OU structure. Joinly builds explicit rules that place each user, and move them on a transfer, into the correct OU.

• Dated and historical records. PeopleNet stores contracts and assignments with effective dates, so a hire or transfer exists in the record before it takes effect. Joinly reads the effective date and has the agent make the change on the right day, not before.

• One person, successive contracts and rehires. Each individual has a single unique identifier that carries several contracts over time. Joinly keys matching on the person id, so a rehire or renewed contract reuses the existing AD object rather than creating a duplicate.

• Service-account permissions. The agent acts under a service account with delegated rights. Joinly works with least-privilege delegation scoped to the target OUs, so the agent can create, move and disable users without domain-admin rights.

Joinly handles each of these by default with custom mapping and transformation.

Always audit-ready

Every account action the Joinly AD Agent performs is logged in the Joinly cloud: who was affected, when it happened, which OU and groups changed and which Cegid HR (Meta4) change triggered it. For NIS2 that matters directly: access can be traced back to an authorised HR source rather than an ad-hoc request. Joinly is ISO 27001 certified, runs in an EU data centre in Amsterdam, applies least-privilege by default, and is built to meet NIS2 and ISO 27001.

Example case

Take a manufacturing group with around 3,200 employees across plants in Spain and France, running Cegid PeopleNet but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its shop-floor and engineering systems. Every new technician, planner or engineer starts as a Cegid ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. There is no first-party AD connector for Cegid Meta4, so the only shortcut is a nightly CSV extract that a script loads, and it can’t decide the OU or the groups. With seasonal contracts and frequent moves between plants the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Cegid HR (Meta4) to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right plant OU on the start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer between plants and disables accounts on the contract end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in PeopleNet and keyed to each person’s unique identifier.

“An account is simply ready in the right plant OU when the technician clocks in, moves between plants sort themselves out, and we can show the auditor exactly which Cegid change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, manufacturing group

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, privilege creep from old roles is eliminated, and the team can walk into its next NIS2 assessment with a complete, source-backed audit trail.