How does Joinly sync Sage People to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in your Sage People org in the cloud through the Salesforce Platform API, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. The Sage People Team Member holds the authoritative employment record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Sage People. Joinly reads the new Team Member and Employment Record, determines the role from HR Department, Team and job title, 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, HR Department or manager, 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 leaving date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, on a schedule you control.

Example: An engineering firm runs Sage People and an on-premise AD across three offices. It hires a design engineer with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the Team Member record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Office-A > Engineering OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Engineering-CAD group. When the engineer later moves to the projects 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 Sage People 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 native Salesforce provisioning targets the Salesforce User in the cloud, not on-premise AD, so for AD 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 HR Department, 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 unused resources keep costing money.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Microsoft’s native Salesforce provisioning writes to the Salesforce User in the cloud, and its provisioning agent can push cloud identities to on-premise AD, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access for a Sage People-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Sage People 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 HR structure. HR Department, Team and Business Unit 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.

• It’s a Salesforce org, not a plain HR feed. Sage People data lives in Salesforce, so access is via a Connected App with OAuth and is subject to Salesforce sharing rules and permission sets. Joinly authenticates as a scoped, API-only integration user, so provisioning is reliable without over-permissioning the connection.

• Team Member vs Salesforce User. The Sage People Team Member (the HR person record) is not the same as the Salesforce User (a licensed login). Joinly drives everything from the Team Member and Employment Record, so people who never log into Salesforce still get an AD account created, moved and disabled.

• 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 Sage People 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 engineering firm with around 1,800 employees across four offices, running Sage People on Salesforce but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its CAD, PLM and file systems. Every new engineer, drafter or site supervisor starts as a Sage People ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. Most of these people never touch Salesforce, so the native Salesforce provisioning never sees them, and with frequent project transfers the queue never empties.

Connect Sage People 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 transfer and disables accounts on the leaving date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Sage People, read straight from the Team Member record.

“Our engineers live in AD, not Salesforce, so nothing off-the-shelf provisioned them. Now an account is simply ready in the right OU when they walk in, transfers move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Sage People change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, engineering firm

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