How does Joinly sync Employes to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in Employes in the cloud through its REST API, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. The Employes werknemersdossier holds the authoritative employment record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Employes. Joinly reads the new employment record, determines the role from department and job type, 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 employment start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department (afdeling), job type (functie) or contract, 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 position is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job.

3. Leaver. On the end date recorded on the employment, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Where a person holds more than one dienstverband, the account is only disabled when the last active employment ends.

Example: An e-commerce and fulfilment company runs Employes and an on-premise AD across its warehouse and office. It hires a warehouse picker with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the employment record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Warehouse > Picking OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern that keeps the tussenvoegsel readable, and adds the Warehouse-Floor group. When the picker later moves to customer service, 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 an email from the payroll administrator 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 Employes has no native AD connector, the alternative is a custom script against its REST API, which still leaves the OU logic, name rules and role-to-group mapping for you to build and maintain.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for an AD account and group access while a request sits in someone’s inbox, losing productive days in their first week.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change department or contract, 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 more than one dienstverband it is easy to disable an account while another employment is still active.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Employes has no native path to on-premise AD at all, so the realistic options are a custom script against its REST API or Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent driven from a generic HR feed. Either way you’re building the logic yourself. Here’s how the Joinly AD Agent compares.

Watch-outs when connecting Employes to Active Directory

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

• sAMAccountName uniqueness and the tussenvoegsel. AD limits the sAMAccountName to 20 characters and it must be unique across the domain, while Employes stores the surname prefix (van der, de) in its own field. Joinly builds the login from your rules with a fallback pattern, so duplicate names never collide and a name like ‘van der Berg’ produces a readable, non-truncated account.

• OU placement from departments and job types. Employes departments (afdeling) and job types (functie) 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.

• Multiple employments. An employee can hold more than one dienstverband in Employes. Joinly applies rules to keep a single, stable AD object driven by the primary employment, so a second contract adds groups rather than creating a duplicate account — and ending one employment doesn’t disable someone who is still employed.

• Poll-based sync and future dates. The Employes API has no webhooks, so provisioning runs on a frequent scheduled import. Joinly reads the start and end dates on the employment record and has the agent create or disable the account on the right day, not before.

• 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 Employes 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 an e-commerce and fulfilment company with around 900 employees across a warehouse, a returns hub and a head office, running Employes for payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its warehouse and WMS logins. Every new picker, driver or support agent starts as an email from payroll that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With peak-season contracts and frequent moves between the warehouse and customer service, the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Employes to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on the start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName that keeps the tussenvoegsel readable, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer and disables accounts on the end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Employes.

“During peak season we onboard dozens of pickers a week. Now an account is simply ready in the right OU when someone starts their shift, moves to customer service move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Employes change created every account.” — Head of IT, e-commerce and fulfilment company

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.