How does Joinly sync Zoho People to Microsoft Entra ID?

Joinly reads each HR change from the Zoho People Employees form through the REST API and applies it to the matching Entra ID account automatically. Zoho People holds the authoritative employee record, so it is the starting point for each identity action.

1. Joiner. HR completes the hire in the Zoho People Employees form. Joinly reads the new record through the API and determines the role from fields like Department, Designation and location. It then creates the account in Entra ID, assigns the right licences and maps the person into the correct groups — timed to the recorded start date.

2. Mover. When someone changes Department, Designation or location in Zoho People, Joinly updates their group membership, permissions and licences to match. Access that no longer fits the new role is revoked, so permissions stay aligned with the actual job.

3. Leaver. On the exit date recorded in Zoho People, Joinly disables the Entra ID account automatically. There are no orphaned accounts left active after someone has left, and licences are freed up rather than quietly billed month after month.

Example: A growing IT-services company hires a support engineer in Zoho People with a start date next Monday, in its Amsterdam office, on the EU data centre. Joinly reads the Employees form through the .eu endpoint, waits until the start date, creates the Entra ID account, assigns an Office E3 licence and adds the engineer to the NL-Support group. When that engineer is later promoted and their Designation changes in Zoho People, Joinly swaps the groups the same day without anyone opening a ticket.

What manual user management costs

Without automation, every account starts as a Zoho People notification or a line in a spreadsheet that IT works through by hand. Microsoft’s native Entra gallery apps and Zoho Directory’s own sync provision users into Zoho, not out of it, so nothing reads the Zoho People Employees form and turns it into Entra ID access — that part still falls to people.

• Onboarding delays. New joiners wait for accounts, licences 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 Department or Designation, old access often stays attached, so people accumulate rights they no longer need.

• Forgotten offboarding. Accounts that aren’t disabled on time are both a security and audit risk, and unused licences keep costing money long after someone has left.

Joinly vs. the native Zoho / Entra provisioning path

The first-party options — Microsoft’s Entra gallery apps for Zoho and Zoho Directory’s own sync — move users into Zoho over SCIM. None of them reads the Zoho People Employees form and provisions outward to Entra ID, which is exactly the direction most HR-driven setups need. Here’s how the two compare.

Watch-outs when connecting Zoho People to Microsoft Entra ID

A few Zoho People-specific details decide whether this connection stays reliable at scale.

• Data-centre region and endpoint. Zoho runs separate data centres — .com (US), .eu (Netherlands), .in (India), .com.au (Australia) and others — and the API and OAuth domains differ per region. Point at the wrong one and authentication simply fails. Joinly connects to your tenant’s region, so an EU org keeps its data on the EU endpoint.

• Forms-based data model. Zoho People stores data as form records with configurable fields, and field API names differ from one org to the next. Joinly maps your actual Employees-form fields per tenant instead of assuming a fixed schema, so custom fields are read correctly.

• Mapping Department and Designation to Entra groups. Zoho’s Department and Designation don’t translate one-to-one to Entra ID groups. Joinly builds explicit mapping rules from those structures to the correct groups and licences, so role drives access rather than manual assignment.

• UPN format with duplicate names. When two employees share a name, a naive UPN rule produces collisions. Joinly applies custom transformation rules — a suffix, location code or controlled tiebreaker — so every UPN is unique and predictable from day one.

• API pagination and rate limits. The Zoho People API returns records in pages (sIndex / rec_limit) and enforces rate limits. Joinly paginates and backs off automatically, so large imports complete reliably without tripping the limit.

Joinly handles each of these by default with custom mapping and transformation.

Always audit-ready

Every account action Joinly performs is logged: who was affected, when it happened, which access changed and which Zoho People 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

Picture an IT-services company with around 700 employees across three countries, running Zoho People as its HR core on the EU data centre while its identity provisioning never quite keeps up. Every new consultant, engineer or account manager starts as a Zoho People record that IT copies into Entra ID by hand — creating the account, picking licences, adding groups. With a steady stream of hires, promotions and the odd contractor conversion, the queue never empties, and new joiners sometimes wait until day two for a working login.

Connect Zoho People to Microsoft Entra ID with Joinly and that work disappears. Joinly reads each HR change from the Employees form at the source and acts on it automatically: new hires have their account, Office licence and group access ready on their start date, a change of Designation swaps the right groups the same day, and leavers are disabled on their exit date with a 30-day soft-delete grace window — all on the correct EU endpoint.

“Provisioning used to be a daily copy-paste job from Zoho People into Entra. Now an account is simply ready on the start date, a promotion just changes the groups, and we can show the auditor exactly which Zoho People change created every bit of access.” — Head of IT, IT-services 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.