How does Joinly sync SD Worx to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in SD Worx. Joinly reads the new werknemer record, determines the role from afdeling, 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 effective in-diensttreding (start date).

2. Mover. When someone changes function, afdeling or kostenplaats — or transfers to another werkgever 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 uit-diensttreding (end date), Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Where a person still holds another active employment under a different Company ID, the account is only disabled when the last dienstverband ends.

Example: A manufacturing company runs SD Worx for payroll and an on-premise AD across three sites. It hires a production operator with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the future-dated record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Site-A > Production OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Production-Operators group based on the kostenplaats. When the operator later moves to maintenance, 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 email 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. A custom SD Worx REST integration can push data to AD, but it offers no role-to-group logic, no OU rules and no notion of the werkgever entity or a future-dated dienstverband, 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 afdeling or kostenplaats, 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 when a person holds employments under more than one Company ID it is easy to disable an account while another dienstverband is still active.

Joinly vs. a custom SD Worx-to-AD integration

SD Worx has no first-party path to on-premise AD, so the alternative is a script or middleware flow that writes to your domain. That baseline moves data; it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for an SD Worx-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting SD Worx 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 — the personeelsnummer makes a reliable tiebreaker — so duplicate names never produce a collision or a truncated, unreadable login.

• OU placement from Belgian payroll structures. Afdeling, kostenplaats and the werkgever 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.

• Social-secretariat multi-entity model. As a sociaal secretariaat, SD Worx serves each client through one or more werkgever entities, scoped per Company ID, and people can move between them. Joinly resolves the active dienstverband to a single, stable AD object, so a transfer moves the object rather than creating a duplicate.

• Future-dated in- and uit-diensttredingen. SD Worx records hires and terminations with effective dates. Joinly reads those dates and has the agent create the account on the right day and disable it on the end date, not before.

• 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 SD Worx 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 manufacturing company with around 1,800 employees across three plants, running SD Worx for payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its shop-floor and ERP systems. Every new operator, technician or supervisor starts as an email from HR that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal contracts and frequent moves between production lines the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

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

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the operator clocks in, moves between lines sort themselves out, and we can show the auditor exactly which SD Worx change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, manufacturing 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.