How does Joinly sync isolved to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR or the service bureau completes the hire in isolved. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from legal company, department, job and work location, 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 isolved hire date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, job, work location or legal company, 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 the isolved status moves to Terminated on the recorded termination date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. A rehire or status reversal is recognised, so the account reactivates rather than a duplicate being created.

Example: A regional logistics SMB runs isolved People Cloud and an on-premise AD across three depots. It hires a dispatch clerk with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the hire record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Depot-North > Dispatch OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Dispatch-Operations group. When the clerk later moves to a second legal company in the same isolved client, the agent keeps one object, moves it to the new OU and swaps the groups the same day.

What manual AD account management costs

Without automation, every account starts as an isolved request that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Marketplace IGA connectors can push isolved data toward AD, but they offer limited mapping, no role-to-group logic and don’t reason about multi-company clients or pay-driven statuses, so the decisions still fall to people.

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

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change department, job or legal company, 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 payroll-driven statuses a Terminated flag can flip back on a rehire or pay correction, so timing matters.

Joinly vs. a marketplace connector for AD

An isolved Marketplace IGA connector can write isolved data to on-premise AD, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for an isolved People Cloud-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting isolved 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 isolved structures. Legal company, department, job and work location 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.

• Multi-company clients. One isolved client can hold several legal companies (FEINs), and employees move between them. Joinly applies rules to keep a single, stable AD object across the move, so a legal-company transfer swaps OU and groups rather than creating a duplicate account.

• Payroll-driven dates and statuses. Hire and termination dates in isolved are pay-driven, and a Terminated status can reverse on a rehire or pay correction. Joinly reads the effective status and has the agent disable on the real termination date and reactivate cleanly on a rehire.

• 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 isolved 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 regional logistics SMB with around 900 employees across three depots, running isolved People Cloud but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its warehouse and dispatch systems. Every new driver, picker or dispatch clerk starts as an isolved request that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal contracts and frequent moves between depots and legal companies the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect isolved to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on the hire date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a depot or legal-company transfer and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in isolved People Cloud.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the clerk walks in, a move between legal companies just relocates the object, and we can show the auditor exactly which isolved change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, regional logistics SMB

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, duplicate accounts from legal-company moves are eliminated, and the team can walk into its next NIS2 assessment with a complete, source-backed audit trail.