How does Joinly sync HoorayHR to Active Directory?

Joinly reads each HR change in HoorayHR 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. HoorayHR holds the authoritative personnel record; the agent is the only component that touches your domain.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in HoorayHR. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from team, department 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 contract start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes team, department or job title, 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, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, so nothing stays active after someone has left.

Example: A creative agency runs HoorayHR and an on-premise AD across two studios. It hires a motion designer with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Studio-Amsterdam > Creative OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Creative-Team group. When the designer later moves to the client-services 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 message in HoorayHR that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. HoorayHR has no native path to on-premise AD, so a smaller IT team carries all of that manually, and the decisions still fall to people.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for an AD account and group access while whoever handles IT gets to it, losing productive days in their first week.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change team or 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 — an active account with mailbox and file access long after someone’s last day.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

There is no native way to push HoorayHR into on-premise AD. Teams either build it themselves or try to route it through Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent, which is designed for other sources and stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how that compares with the Joinly AD Agent for a HoorayHR-driven setup.

Watch-outs when connecting HoorayHR to Active Directory

A few details decide whether this connection stays reliable as the company grows.

• 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 — common in a smaller company — never produce a collision or a truncated, unreadable login.

• OU placement from teams and departments. HoorayHR teams, departments and branches 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.

• Contract start and end dates. HoorayHR records a start and end date before they take effect. Joinly reads those dates and has the agent create the account on the start date and disable it on the end date, not before and not late.

• API authentication and MFA. The HoorayHR API uses account credentials and its documentation requires MFA to be disabled on the API account. Joinly connects through a dedicated, least-privilege service account with encrypted credentials, so a real user’s security isn’t weakened to run the integration.

• 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 HoorayHR 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 marketing and creative agency with around 220 employees across two studios, running HoorayHR but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its file shares and design workstations. Every new designer, strategist or account manager starts as a message in HoorayHR that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With freelancers rolling on and off projects and frequent moves between teams, the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

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

“A designer’s account is simply ready in the right OU when they walk in, moves between teams sort themselves out, and we can show exactly which HoorayHR change created every bit of access — without one of us doing it by hand.” — Head of IT, marketing and creative agency

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, privilege creep from old team memberships is eliminated, and the team has a complete, source-backed audit trail without building the integration themselves.