How does Joinly sync Namely to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Namely. Joinly reads the new profile, determines the role from job title, department and Group membership, 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 — ready on the recorded start date.

2. Mover. When someone’s job title, department or Group changes in Namely, 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. When a profile’s user_status changes to an inactive status on the termination date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Rehires are matched back to the existing object rather than creating a duplicate.

Example: A retail chain runs Namely and an on-premise AD across its head office and stores. It hires a store supervisor with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the profile, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Stores > North-Region OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Store-Supervisors group based on the Namely Group. When the supervisor later moves to a different region, 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 Namely 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. Namely’s Entra app is single sign-on only and doesn’t touch on-premise AD at all, 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.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change job title, department or Group, 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 with high-turnover retail roles, a missed leaver can leave an active login in a store long after someone has gone.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Namely has no on-premise AD connector of its own, so the alternative is Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent driven by generic inbound provisioning. It can write attributes to on-premise AD, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Namely-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Namely 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 Groups and departments. Namely models structure through free-form Groups, Group Types and departments rather than a fixed hierarchy, so they 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.

• user_status and employee_type. Namely separates user_status from employee_type and includes inactive and guest profiles. Joinly maps these states explicitly, so the agent only creates, keeps or disables the accounts you intend and never acts on a guest profile by accident.

• Resolving the reports-to manager. The manager is stored as a reports-to reference to another Namely profile. Joinly resolves that link to the correct AD object, so the manager attribute stays accurate for reporting and manager-based group rules.

• 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 Namely 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 retail chain with around 3,500 employees across a head office and dozens of stores, running Namely but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its till, rota and back-office systems. Every new store colleague, supervisor or head-office hire starts as a Namely note that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the store OU, building the login, adding groups. With high seasonal turnover and constant transfers between stores the queue never empties, and new joiners often wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Namely to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right store OU on the start date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a store transfer and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Namely, and matching rehires back to their old object rather than making a new one.

“With that much turnover, manual AD work was a constant. Now an account is simply ready in the right store OU on day one, transfers move themselves, and we can show the auditor which Namely change created every login.” — Head of IT, retail chain

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, privilege creep from old stores is eliminated, and the team can walk into its next NIS2 assessment with a complete, source-backed audit trail.