How does Joinly sync HiBob to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Bob. Joinly reads the new profile — including the upcoming lifecycle status and start date — determines the role from site, department and team, 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.

2. Mover. When someone changes team, department or site in Bob, 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. When Bob flips a person to a leaving / terminated lifecycle status on the recorded end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, tied back to the exact Bob status transition.

Example: A media company runs Bob and an on-premise AD across three sites. It hires a video editor with a start date next Monday, attached to the London site and the Post-Production team. The person sits as ‘upcoming’ in Bob. Joinly reads the record by lifecycle status and start date, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the London > Post-Production OU, sets a unique sAMAccountName, and adds the Post-Prod group. When the editor later moves to the broadcast team, 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 HiBob 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. Bob’s SCIM app and Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent can push data to on-premise AD, but with limited mapping, no role-to-group logic and the lifecycle-status gaps that hide upcoming hires, 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 — and an ‘upcoming’ hire hidden from a default query simply never gets created.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change team or site, 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 a leaving status that nobody actions leaves an account live long after the person has gone.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

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

Watch-outs when connecting HiBob 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 sites and teams. Bob’s site, department and team structure doesn’t map one-to-one to your OU tree. Joinly builds explicit rules that place each user — and move them on a transfer — into the correct OU.

• Lifecycle status and upcoming hires. Bob stores a future hire as ‘upcoming’ and hides it from default queries before the first working day. Joinly reads by lifecycle status and start date and has the agent create the account on the right day, not before and never missed.

• Rapid org changes in a scale-up. Fast-growing companies rename teams and open new sites constantly, so hard-coded OU and group rules rot. Joinly re-evaluates rule-based mappings on every sync, so the AD structure follows the org chart.

• 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 HiBob 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 media company with around 1,800 employees across three sites, running Bob but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its editing and broadcast systems. Every new editor, producer or support worker starts as a HiBob ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With freelance contracts, frequent team moves and a steady stream of ‘upcoming’ hires that don’t show up in a default query, the queue never empties and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect HiBob 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, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a team change and disables accounts when Bob flips them to a leaving status, with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Bob.

“Upcoming hires used to hide from us until day three. Now an account is simply ready in the right OU when the editor walks in, team moves move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Bob change created every bit of access.”

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