How does Joinly sync Zenegy to Active Directory?

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

1. Joiner. Payroll or HR completes the hire in Zenegy. Joinly reads the new records, determines the role from 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 employment start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes department or job title, 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 role 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, so access ends exactly when the employment does.

Example: A skilled-trades company runs Zenegy and an on-premise AD across three branches. It hires an electrician with a start date next Monday. Joinly reads the future-dated record, and on Monday morning the AD Agent creates the user in the Branch-North > Field OU, sets the sAMAccountName to a unique pattern, and adds the Field-Electrical group. When the electrician later moves to the projects office, 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 message from payroll that an admin works through in Active Directory Users and Computers by hand — creating the object, choosing the OU, building the sAMAccountName, adding groups. Zenegy has no native AD connector, so the usual stopgap is a manual export, which offers no OU logic, no role-to-group mapping and no reliable timing, so 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.

• Permissions that don’t keep up (privilege creep). When movers change department, 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 a manual export rarely reflects a leaver on the exact termination date recorded in Zenegy.

Joinly vs. the Entra provisioning agent for AD

Zenegy has no native path to on-premise AD, so the native fallback is Microsoft’s Entra provisioning / cloud-sync agent fed from a Zenegy export. It can write attributes, but it stops short of the part that actually decides access. Here’s how the two compare for a Zenegy-driven AD setup.

Watch-outs when connecting Zenegy 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 a flat department model. Zenegy’s structure is a shallow company-and-departments model, which doesn’t map one-to-one to your OU tree. Joinly builds explicit rules that combine department, job title and location to place each user — and move them on a transfer — into the correct OU.

• Future-dated payroll changes. Zenegy stores a hire as a future-dated record before the first working day. Joinly reads the employment start date and has the agent create the account on the right day, not before.

• No native identity connector. Zenegy is built to push payroll and accounting data, not to create AD objects. Joinly supplies the whole joiner-mover-leaver path — creation, OU placement, group membership and disabling — that Zenegy leaves to you.

• 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 Zenegy 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 runs in an EU data centre in Amsterdam, applies least-privilege by default, and is built to meet NIS2 and GDPR.

Example case

Take a skilled-trades company with around 700 employees across three branches — electricians, plumbers and fitters — running Zenegy for payroll but still living in an on-premise Active Directory for its planning and field systems. Every new tradesperson starts as a message from payroll that IT processes by hand in AD — creating the object, choosing the branch OU, building the login, adding groups. With apprentices, seasonal crews and frequent moves between branches the queue never empties, and new joiners wait until day two or three for their account.

Connect Zenegy 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 and disables accounts on the termination date with a 30-day grace window — all driven by the HR change in Zenegy.

“A login is simply ready in the right branch OU when the electrician turns up, moves between branches sort themselves out, and we can show exactly which Zenegy change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, skilled-trades company

The outcome this setup is designed for: onboarding drops from days to zero touch, privilege creep from old branches is eliminated, and the team has a complete, source-backed audit trail for its next security review.