How does Joinly sync Yoobi to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each employee change in Yoobi through the REST API in the cloud, then hands the action to the Joinly AD Agent inside your network, which makes the change in Active Directory. Yoobi holds the authoritative employee and contract record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Yoobi and the contract is set. Joinly reads the new records, determines the role from department and function, 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 contract start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, function or contract in Yoobi, 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 role is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job.

3. Leaver. On the contract end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. External and freelance records are excluded, so only genuine employees ever have an account to disable.

Example: An architecture and engineering firm runs Yoobi and an on-premise AD across two offices. It hires a structural engineer with a contract starting next Monday. Joinly reads the contract 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 project-management 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 Yoobi export that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Yoobi offers no path to on-premise AD, so unless you build custom middleware against the REST API and LDAP yourself, 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 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 — especially easy to miss when a Yoobi contract simply expires without a ticket being raised.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Yoobi has no route to on-premise AD, so the native alternative is Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent fed from a directory, or custom middleware you build yourself. Here’s how the Joinly AD Agent compares for a Yoobi-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Yoobi 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 department and function. Yoobi’s afdeling and functie 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.

• Employees vs. external and freelance workers. Yoobi holds internal employees alongside external and freelance (ZZP) workers who book hours on projects. Joinly filters on the employee and contract record so only genuine employees get an AD account, and the agent never creates objects for non-employees.

• Contract record, not project assignment. A person’s identity in Yoobi is defined by the employee contract, not by the projects they book hours on. Joinly drives OU placement and groups from the contract’s department and function, so a project assignment never dictates AD access.

• 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 Yoobi 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 architecture and engineering firm with around 500 employees across four offices, running Yoobi for its employee administration and project hours but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its CAD and design systems. Every new architect, engineer or support worker starts as a Yoobi record that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With freelance draughtsmen booking hours alongside staff and frequent moves between disciplines, the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Yoobi to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each employee in the right OU on the contract start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer and disables accounts on the contract end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the employee record in Yoobi, with freelancers filtered out.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the engineer walks in, moves between disciplines follow themselves, freelancers never get an account by accident, and we can show the auditor exactly which Yoobi change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, architecture and engineering 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.