How does Joinly sync Sesame HR to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Sesame HR. Joinly reads the new record, determines the role from department, office 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 recorded start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department, office or manager, 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 end date recorded in Sesame HR, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. When a seasonal worker returns, Joinly matches the rehire back to the existing object and re-enables it rather than creating a duplicate.

Example: A private clinic group runs Sesame HR and an on-premise AD across four sites. It hires a receptionist with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Site-A > FrontDesk OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Reception group. When the receptionist later moves to a different clinic, 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 Sesame HR 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. There is no native path from Sesame HR to on-premise AD, so without Joinly this is either fully manual or a custom script someone has to own, and 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 — painful when a shift worker is expected on site from day one.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change department or office, 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 frequent seasonal turnover it is easy to lose track of who has actually left.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

There is no native path from Sesame HR to on-premise AD, so the closest native comparison is stitching the Sesame HR API into Entra’s provisioning agent yourself. It stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Sesame HR-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Sesame HR 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 departments and offices. Sesame HR departments and offices (work centres) don’t map one-to-one to your OU structure, and records can be sparse. Joinly builds explicit rules — with fallbacks — that place each user, and move them on a transfer, into the correct OU.

• Part-time, temporary and seasonal churn. SME workforces here turn over quickly and the same person often returns. Joinly matches a rehire to the existing AD object and re-enables it, so a returning worker keeps their identity instead of getting a fresh, duplicate account.

• Attendance data volume. Sesame HR carries a lot of high-volume clock-in and time data alongside identities. Joinly reads only the employee, department and office objects the agent needs on a frequent schedule, so provisioning stays fast and focused.

• 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 Sesame HR 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 private clinic group with around 1,300 employees across eight sites, running Sesame HR for time tracking and scheduling but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its clinical and practice systems. Every new receptionist, nurse or support worker starts as a manual job that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With part-time contracts and frequent moves between sites the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account. Seasonal returners keep getting brand-new objects, cluttering the directory.

Connect Sesame HR 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, matches returning staff back to their existing object, and disables accounts on the end date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Sesame HR.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the receptionist walks in, returning staff keep their old login, transfers move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Sesame HR change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, private clinic group

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