How does Joinly sync Sympa to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in Sympa. Joinly reads the new profile, determines the role from entity, unit, 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 recorded start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes position, unit 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 — including transfers between entities.

3. Leaver. On the end date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. A soft-delete grace window keeps the account recoverable before it is retired.

Example: A manufacturer runs Sympa and an on-premise AD across three plants. It hires a maintenance technician with a start date next Monday in its Finnish entity. Joinly reads the profile through the REST API, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the FI-Plant-Maintenance OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Maintenance-Shopfloor group. When the technician later moves to the quality department, 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 Sympa 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. Sympa’s native connector only writes to Entra ID, so on-premise AD gets no help from it at all and every decision falls 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 position 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 with a purely manual process it is easy to miss a leaver entirely.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

There is no native Sympa path to on-premise Active Directory, so the realistic alternative is Microsoft’s Entra provisioning agent writing data down to AD. It stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Sympa-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Sympa 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 entities and units. Sympa’s entity, unit, geography and department 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-country, multi-entity structure. In a Nordic Sympa setup a person can move between entities and geographies. Joinly applies the correct OU and group mapping per entity and reapplies it on every transfer, so a cross-entity move doesn’t leave a stale object behind.

• Fully configurable data model. Because Sympa customers build their own interfaces and fields, the attributes your tenant exposes through the API differ from the next. Joinly maps the exact fields your Sympa exposes rather than assuming a fixed schema.

• 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 Sympa 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 an industrial manufacturer with around 3,200 employees across four plants in Finland and Sweden, running Sympa as its HR core but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its shop-floor and engineering systems. Every new operator, technician or engineer starts as a Sympa ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the plant OU, building the login, adding groups. The native Sympa connector only reaches Entra ID, so on-premise AD gets none of that automation, and with shift work and internal transfers the queue never empties.

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

“The native connector never touched our on-premise AD, so every shop-floor account was manual. Now an account is simply ready in the right plant OU when the technician clocks in, transfers move themselves, and we can show the auditor exactly which Sympa change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, industrial 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.