How does Joinly sync PeopleStrong to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in PeopleStrong. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from Org Unit, Worksite and Entity, 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.

2. Mover. When someone changes Org Unit, Worksite or Entity, 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 termination date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU, then removes it after a grace window so nothing is deleted prematurely.

Example: A manufacturer runs PeopleStrong for its HR and an on-premise AD across three plants held under two Entities. It hires a maintenance technician for its Pune plant. Joinly reads the new record, and the AD Agent creates the user in the Pune > Maintenance OU, sets a unique sAMAccountName, and adds the Plant-Maintenance group based on the Org Unit. When the technician later moves to a plant under the other Entity, 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 PeopleStrong ticket that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Microsoft’s API-driven provisioning can write to on-premise AD once you build the pipeline that pulls PeopleStrong data, but it offers limited mapping and no role-to-group logic, so 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 Org Unit or Entity, 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 leave the plant floor with logins nobody owns.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Because PeopleStrong isn’t a pre-built Entra app, the native AD path is API-driven provisioning to on-premise AD through the Entra provisioning agent — you still build the pipeline that pulls PeopleStrong. Here’s how the two compare.

Watch-outs when connecting PeopleStrong 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 Org Units and entities. PeopleStrong’s Org Unit, Worksite and Entity 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.

• Multi-entity, multi-country structures. In APAC enterprise deployments a worker can belong to a different Entity and Worksite than their reporting Org Unit. Joinly keeps these as separate dimensions so the OU and group decision stays correct across the group’s legal entities.

• Full-load vs modified-data reconciliation. Relying only on the modified-data call can miss a change if a run is skipped. Joinly combines the full-load and delta calls and reconciles them, so AD matches PeopleStrong even after an interruption.

• 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 PeopleStrong 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 manufacturer with around 3,500 employees across three plants held under two Entities, running PeopleStrong but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its shop-floor and ERP systems. Every new operator, engineer or supervisor starts as a PeopleStrong ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With shift-based hiring and frequent transfers between plants the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect PeopleStrong to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on day one, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer between plants and Entities, and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in PeopleStrong.

“Shift hiring across plants meant the AD queue never emptied. Now an account is simply ready in the right OU when the operator clocks in, transfers move themselves between plants, and we can show the auditor exactly which PeopleStrong change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, manufacturer

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.