How does Joinly sync Simployer to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Simployer. Joinly reads the new records, determines the role from department, team, office and cost center, 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 employment start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, team or office, 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 employment end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. A leave record — such as long-term sick leave — is treated as absence, so an account is only disabled when employment actually ends.

Example: A Norwegian construction firm runs Simployer and an on-premise AD across three regional offices and its site cabins. It hires a site engineer with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Region-West > Projects OU, sets a transliterated sAMAccountName within the 20-character limit, and adds the Site-Engineers group. When the engineer later moves to another region, 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 Simployer notification that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Simployer’s native SCIM feed can’t help here at all: it sends a one-way Users list to cloud services and never touches an on-premise domain, so every AD decision falls 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 department, team or office, 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 it is easy to disable someone who is only on long-term leave rather than actually gone.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Simployer’s own SCIM feed cannot write to on-premise AD, so the native alternative is Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent driven by API-based inbound provisioning. It can push data to AD but stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Simployer-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Simployer to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable at scale.

• sAMAccountName uniqueness, length and Nordic characters. AD limits the sAMAccountName to 20 characters and it must be unique across the domain, while Norwegian and Swedish names carry characters AD can’t store there. Joinly transliterates and builds the name from your rules with a fallback pattern, so duplicate or accented names never produce a collision or a broken, unreadable login.

• OU placement from Simployer structure. Department, team, office and cost center 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.

• Absence and long-term leave are not termination. Simployer treats sick leave and other absence as first-class records. A naive rule can read ‘absent’ as ‘gone’ and disable a live account. Joinly keeps the AD object active during leave and only disables it when the employment end date arrives.

• The native SCIM feed can’t reach AD. Simployer’s Provisioning API is a one-way Users feed for cloud services and never touches on-premise AD. Joinly reads the richer HR Connect API and drives AD through its own agent, so on-premise provisioning is fully covered.

• 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 Simployer 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 Norwegian construction firm with around 1,800 employees across regional offices and active building sites, running Simployer but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its planning and drawing systems. Every new site engineer, foreman or office worker starts as a Simployer notification that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal project crews and frequent moves between sites the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Simployer 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, transliterated sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer between regions and disables accounts on the employment end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Simployer, and all leaving accounts alone while someone is on leave.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the engineer turns up on site, transfers between regions move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Simployer change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, construction firm

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.