How does Joinly sync UKG Pro to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in UKG Pro. Joinly reads the new employment record, determines the role from job, location, company and Organization Levels 1 to 4, 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 hire date.

2. Mover. When someone changes job, location, company or an Org Level, 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 job is removed, so permissions stay aligned with the actual position.

3. Leaver. On the termination date, Joinly instructs the agent to disable the AD account and optionally move it to a disabled-users OU. Secondary jobs are taken into account, so an account is only disabled when the last active employment record ends.

Example: A logistics and distribution company runs UKG Pro and an on-premise AD across three depots. It hires a warehouse picker with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the employment record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Depot-North > Operations OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Warehouse-Operations group. When the picker later takes a secondary job in dispatch, the agent keeps the primary record driving the object, moves it to the new OU on a transfer and swaps the groups the same day.

What manual AD account management costs

Without automation, every account starts as a UKG Pro 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. UKG offers no native AD provisioning, so teams rely on an SFTP extract, a script or middleware that offers limited mapping, no Org-Level-to-OU logic and no primary-record handling — 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 job or location, 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 secondary jobs it is easy to disable an account while another employment record is still active.

Joinly vs. an SFTP / script feed to AD

Because UKG offers no native AD provisioning, the baseline is an SFTP/CSV extract, a PowerShell script or middleware — fine at moving data, but stopping short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a UKG Pro-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting UKG Pro 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 Levels. Organization Levels 1 to 4, company and location 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.

• Multiple and secondary jobs. An employee can hold more than one active employment record. Joinly keeps a single, stable AD object driven by the Make-Primary record, so a second job adds groups rather than creating a duplicate account.

• Rehires and duplicate objects. A rehire in UKG Pro often creates a fresh employment record. Joinly matches the rehire to the existing AD object by employee number, so the original account is re-enabled instead of a duplicate object being created.

• 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 UKG Pro 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 logistics and distribution company with around 2,800 employees across nine depots, running UKG Pro but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its warehouse and routing systems. Every new picker, driver or dispatcher starts as a UKG Pro ticket that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the login, adding groups. With seasonal peaks and frequent depot transfers the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect UKG Pro to Active Directory with Joinly and that work disappears. The Joinly AD Agent creates each user in the right OU on the hire date, builds a unique sAMAccountName, adds the correct security groups, moves people on a transfer and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the employment record in UKG Pro, with the primary record keeping a single object even when a picker takes a secondary job.

“An account is simply ready in the right OU when the driver walks in, transfers move themselves, a rehired seasonal worker gets their old account back, and we can show the auditor exactly which UKG Pro change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, logistics and distribution company

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