How does Joinly sync Buddee to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Buddee. Joinly reads the new employee and their active employment, determines the role from 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 real contract start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes team, department or role in Buddee, 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 contract end date in Buddee, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. A grace window can retire the object safely a set number of days later.

Example: A commercial cleaning company runs Buddee for its largely mobile, shift-based workforce and an on-premise AD for its back-office and planning systems. It hires a new team lead with a contract starting next Monday. Joinly reads the employment record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Region-South > Operations OU, sets a unique sAMAccountName, and adds the Team-Leads group. When that lead later moves regions, 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 message from HR that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Buddee has a REST API you could script against, but nobody wants to own that code, and Buddee’s own SSO only signs existing users in, so the decisions still fall to people.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for an AD account and group access while a request sits in a queue, losing productive days in their first week — costly when day one is a working shift.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change team or role, 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 a contract simply ends in Buddee and no one tells IT.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent can write cloud HR data to on-premise AD, but Buddee is not one of its native sources, so the realistic native path is a self-built script against the Buddee API plus the agent. Here’s how that compares to the Joinly AD Agent.

Watch-outs when connecting Buddee 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 Buddee structure. Buddee’s department, team and job title 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.

• Read the employment, not just the employee. In Buddee the definitive contract dates live on the active employment and its employment terms. Joinly reads the active employment so the agent creates the account on the real start date and disables it on the real end date.

• No native identity logic. Buddee has no concept of a sAMAccountName, UPN or OU. Joinly layers all of that on top, so an HR platform with no directory logic still drives a correct AD object.

• 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 Buddee 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 commercial cleaning company with around 1,800 employees spread across client sites, running Buddee for HR and payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its planning and back-office systems. The workforce turns over constantly — short contracts, seasonal peaks, people moving between regions — and every new team lead or office worker starts as a message to IT that an admin processes by hand in AD, creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With that churn the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Buddee to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user 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 HR change in Buddee.

“With this much turnover we simply couldn’t keep AD clean by hand. Now an account is ready in the right OU when someone starts, and it’s gone when their contract ends — and we can prove which Buddee change caused each change.” — Head of IT, cleaning company

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.