How does Joinly sync Acerta to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Acerta Connect. Joinly reads the new records, determines the role from department, kostenplaats and paritair comité, 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 start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, cost centre or status, 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 uitdiensttreding date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, so offboarding runs on the HR date rather than a manual reminder.

Example: A construction and installation firm runs Acerta Connect and an on-premise AD across three sites. It hires a site foreman with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Site-Antwerp > Projects OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Field-Crew group. When the foreman later moves to the workshop, 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 an Acerta note that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. There is no native Microsoft provisioning app for Acerta, so teams either script a custom export or do it by hand; either way the decisions that actually grant access 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 — easy to miss when offboarding depends on someone remembering to act on an Acerta change.

Joinly vs. a custom Acerta export to AD

There is no native Microsoft provisioning agent that reads Acerta, so the realistic comparison is against a custom script or export that writes Acerta data into AD. It can push attributes, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare.

Watch-outs when connecting Acerta 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 the Belgian org model. Kostenplaats, paritair comité, statuut (arbeider vs bediende) and department don’t map one-to-one to your OU structure, and Acerta’s underlying objects aren’t publicly documented. Joinly builds explicit, reviewed rules that place each user — and move them on a transfer — into the correct OU.

• Payroll-first, batch-flavoured data. Acerta is a sociaal secretariaat, so its exchange channel can be file- or batch-flavoured rather than a rich real-time API. Joinly is built to run off periodic imports and still keep AD accurate, so a batch cadence doesn’t leave orphaned or delayed accounts.

• Multi-language NL/FR data. Names, job titles and department labels arrive in Dutch or French, with diacritics. Joinly applies transformation rules that produce a clean, consistent sAMAccountName, UPN and display name whichever language a record is in.

• 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 Acerta 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 construction and installation firm with around 700 employees across three sites, running Acerta Connect for payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its project and planning systems. Every new arbeider, site foreman or office bediende starts as an Acerta change that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal project peaks and frequent moves between sites the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Acerta 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 between sites on a transfer and disables accounts on the uitdiensttreding date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Acerta Connect.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the foreman starts on site, moves between sites move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Acerta change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, construction and installation 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.