How does Joinly sync Keka to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Keka. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from department, job title 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 recorded joining date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, business unit or legal entity, 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 Date of Exit recorded in Keka, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. The leaver action keys off the recorded exit date, so a late or bulk-entered exit still triggers the right offboarding.

Example: A manufacturer runs Keka and an on-premise AD across two plants. It hires a maintenance technician with a joining date next Monday. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Plant-1 > Maintenance OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Maintenance-Team group. When the technician later moves to the second plant, 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 Keka 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 there is no native Keka connector, the do-it-yourself alternative is a custom script around the Keka API and the AD PowerShell module, which nobody wants to own — 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, 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 when a Date of Exit is entered late or uploaded in bulk after the person has already left.

Joinly vs. a custom script for Keka → AD

Because Microsoft ships no Keka connector, the alternative for on-premise AD is a home-grown script around the Keka API and AD PowerShell. It can write objects, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Keka-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Keka 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 legal entities and business units. Keka’s legal entity, business unit and department don’t map one-to-one to your OU structure, and one tenant can hold several legal entities. Joinly builds explicit rules that place each user — and move them on a transfer — into the correct OU.

• India statutory fields. Keka records carry UAN, PF, ESI and PAN. These belong in HR and payroll, not the directory. Joinly maps only the attributes you choose, so no statutory identifier ends up as an AD attribute or account key.

• Date of Exit timing. The exit date in Keka can be entered late or in a bulk upload. Joinly keys the disable action off the recorded Date of Exit, so offboarding runs correctly even when the record is updated after the fact.

• 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 Keka 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 manufacturer with around 1,800 employees across two plants, running Keka for HR but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its production and shop-floor systems. Every new operator, technician or supervisor starts as a Keka ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With shift hiring and frequent moves between plants the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Keka to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on the joining date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer and disables accounts on the Date of Exit with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Keka, with UAN and PF numbers staying in payroll.

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

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.