How does Joinly sync Unit4 to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in Unit4 ERPx in the cloud, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. Unit4 holds the authoritative resource record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Unit4, creating the resource and its position. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from position, cost centre and dimensions, 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 effective start date.

2. Mover. When a resource changes position, cost centre or organisation unit, 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 end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Where a resource holds more than one position, the account is only disabled when the last active appointment ends.

Example: A municipality runs Unit4 and an on-premise AD across several service departments. It hires a case worker with a start date next Monday, attached to the Social Services cost centre. Joinly reads the effective-dated record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Social-Services OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Casework group. When the case worker later moves to another department, 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 Unit4 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. Unit4 has no first-party path to on-premise AD, so short of a custom Extension Kit or middleware build the decisions all 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 resources 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 — and where a resource holds more than one position it is easy to disable an account while another appointment is still active.

Joinly vs. a custom Unit4-to-AD build

Unit4 has no first-party connector that writes HR data to on-premise AD, so the alternative is a custom Extension Kit or middleware build against the ERPx API plus your own scripting. Here’s how Joinly compares for a Unit4-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Unit4 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 cost centres and dimensions. Unit4’s VITA cost centres, organisation units and dimensions differ from tenant to tenant and 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.

• Effective-dated future starts and fixed-term contracts. Unit4 stores a start as an effective-dated record before the first working day, and fixed-term and seasonal contracts are common in services and the public sector. Joinly reads the effective start and end dates and has the agent create and disable the account on the right days, not before.

• Multiple positions per resource. A single resource can hold more than one position at once — common in local government and higher education. Joinly applies rules to keep a single, stable AD object driven by the primary appointment, so a second position adds groups rather than creating a duplicate account.

• 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 Unit4 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 municipality with around 1,800 employees across a dozen service departments, running Unit4 as its HR and finance core but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its case-management and line-of-business systems. Every new case worker, planner or support officer starts as a Unit4 ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With fixed-term contracts and frequent internal moves the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Unit4 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 end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Unit4.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the case worker walks in, internal moves move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Unit4 change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, municipality

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.