How does Joinly sync Factorial to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Factorial. Joinly reads the new employee and the latest contract version, determines the role from team, job and legal entity, 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 start date on the record.

2. Mover. When someone changes team, location, legal entity 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, and because Joinly reads the current contract version, a promotion updates the groups rather than leaving an old title in place.

3. Leaver. On the termination date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, so no account stays active after someone has left.

Example: A retail chain runs Factorial and an on-premise AD across its head office and stores. It hires a store supervisor with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the record and the latest contract version, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Stores > North-Region OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Store-Staff group. When the supervisor later moves to head office, 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 Factorial 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. Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent can push data to on-premise AD, but it offers limited mapping, no role-to-group logic and no notion of Factorial’s contract versions, 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 team or location, 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 — especially in a retail environment with high turnover and shared shift devices.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent can write HR data to on-premise AD, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Factorial-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Factorial to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable as you grow.

• 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 teams and legal entities. Factorial’s teams, locations and legal entities 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, which matters as an SME opens new locations and entities.

• Job title lives on the contract version. The current job title in Factorial sits on the latest contract version, not the employee record. Joinly always resolves the latest contract version, so a promotion drives the right OU and groups instead of leaving someone on an old title.

• Future start dates and terminations. Factorial stores a hire with a start date that can be in the future and a termination date on exit. Joinly has the agent create the account on the start date and disable it on the termination date, not before or after.

• 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 Factorial 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 retail chain with around 1,800 employees across a head office and dozens of stores, running Factorial but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its till and back-office systems. Every new store colleague starts as a Factorial ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the store OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal peaks and constant staff turnover the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Factorial to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right store OU on the start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer between stores or to head office and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Factorial.

“An account is simply ready in the right store OU when the colleague starts their first shift, transfers move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Factorial change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, retail chain

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