Integrating TINYpulse Engage with your company's existing Azure Active Directory will simplify user management through automation. No longer will you have to manually add users one by one, or send an import file to the TINYpulse Customer Success Team. Complete the Active Directory integration one time and users will sync automatically into TINYpulse.
( ! ) This integration is only for user management and not for Single Sign-On. If you would like to set up a Single Sign-On integration with Azure Active Directory, please reach out to our Support team so that they can help you build out this integration.
In this article:
Prerequisites
To complete this integration, you'll need these three things:
- An Azure Active Directory instance at your company
- Global Admin rights to your Azure AD instance
- Super Admin rights in TINYpulse
( ! ) If you are missing any one of these three things, please contact your in-house technical team for assistance before proceeding.
Integrate TINYpulse with Azure AD
Whether you are new to TINYpulse or you have been pulsing for years, the Azure Active Directory integration will significantly decrease your time spent housekeeping employees in TINYpulse.
1. Log in to TINYpulse and navigate to the Integrations page under the Settings tab.
2. Locate the Azure Active Directory 'card' in the list and click to open it.
3. Click Connect.
4. Enter your Active Directory login credentials and Sign In.
5. You will be asked to grant permission to TINYpulse to the Azure AD instance. Read the message and Accept to return back to TINYpulse.
6. Now that you are integrated, you still have to import the Azure AD groups to TINYpulse. Select the group(s) from the dropdown list that you would like to sync and click Add when you are done.
If you are new to TINYpulse and have not invited any users yet, but your account has launched, clicking Add will send invitation emails to new users immediately. Once they get the email, employees can set their TINYpulse password and will have full access to respond to their Engage survey, send Cheers, give anonymous suggestions, and more.
If your account has not launched yet, then your users will be added to your account, but they will not be sent an invitation to join TINYpulse until your account has launched.
If you have been pulsing for a while and are just looking to simplify user management going forward, existing TINYpulse users will be unaffected by the sync. They will not get any sort of notification from TINYpulse. However, if there are any TINYpulse users in your account that do not appear in Azure AD, they will be deactivated immediately. Azure AD serves as the one source of truth so please make sure that all of your TINYpulse users belong to one of the Azure AD groups you have synced.
Change your update preference
When you select Azure AD groups to sync to TINYpulse, they will import instantly and groups will be auto-synced once per day after that at Midnight UTC. (Not sure where you land by comparison? The World Clock can help!)
The default setting is to sync selected Azure AD groups automatically. You can opt for manual updates by going to the Apps section and switching automatic updates off. When you switch to manual update mode, an Update button will appear so you can manually sync users between Azure AD and TINYpulse on demand.
Turn off auto-updates for more control of your imports. However, we recommend keeping auto-updates on, especially if you have a dedicated Azure AD group for TINYpulse use. See below for more information about creating a new Azure AD group.
Sync Segments*
For further automation of TINYpulse user management, you can enable Segment syncs. This will automatically create new TINYpulse Segments based on your existing Azure Active Directory group structure.
For example, let's say you have added these Azure AD groups to TINYpulse: Marketing Team, Sales Team, Engineering Team. This function automatically creates "Marketing Team, Sales Team, and Engineering Team" TINYpulse Segments, which allows you to easily view feedback in a filtered and targeted way without any upkeep within TINYpulse.
Once you have turned on Segment syncs, feel free to update the Segment names or change the mapping to another existing Segment.
( ! ) Segments have generally been replaced by Primary Attributes for better qualitative and quantitative reporting. If you are new to TINYpulse, we recommend leaving the Segments Sync feature off for your Azure AD integration.
Note: The fields listed below are what will be synced by default. This is based on what the API returns. TINYpulse has no control over what is returned to us by the API.
employee_id
first_name
last_name
position_title
department
office_location
Frequently Asked Questions
Will my existing users get overwritten if I import them from Azure AD?
If the employee's email address from Azure AD matches the one in TINYpulse then they will not be overwritten. They will still keep their Cheers, Pulse Streaks, and Attributes, the only difference is their name will update if there is a mismatch between Azure AD and TINYpulse. Azure AD is considered the source so the sync will update the name in TINYpulse to match.
What happens if an existing TINYpulse user does not belong to any of the Azure AD groups I have synced to TINYpulse?
Once you have completed your configuration, any users who do not belong to one of the synced Azure AD groups will be deactivated in TINYpulse. To avoid any disruption to your users and admin team, make sure that all TINYpulse users belong to an Azure AD group that is being synced to TINYpulse.
Can I use Onboard for new hires with the Azure AD integration?
At this time, all users synced from Azure AD will get Engage surveys by default; new hires will not get Onboard Surveys. Please contact our Support team by clicking this link for assistance moving newly hired employees from Engage to Onboard.
How do I deactivate a user when using Azure AD integration?
You have to remove them from the Azure AD group itself. We recommend having one specific Azure AD group just for TINYpulse and you can add or remove users as needed (see below). If you deactivate the user in TINYpulse without removing them from the Azure AD group, they will just get reactivated during the next sync.
What happens if I deactivate a user in TINYpulse but they still belong to the Azure AD group?
They will get reactivated during the next sync. See above.
What happens if a deactivated TINYpulse user gets synced from Azure AD?
The deactivated TINYpulse user will reactivate if they belong to an imported Azure AD group. Remove the employee from the Azure AD group in order to keep them deactivated in TINYpulse.
What happens when a user gets removed from the Azure AD group?
They will be deactivated in TINYpulse and will not count against your per-seat subscription size.
Fields that we pull from Azure AD
- Supported standard properties are documented here: user resource type - Microsoft Graph v1.0. However, we currently only pull id, displayName, givenName, jobTitle, mail, officeLocation, surname, userPrincipalName, department and employeeHireDate.
- Regarding manager-related information, we are still pulling manager_email and manager_employee_id. But please note that these fields will not appear in the payload if the HRIS integration is configured on our end to not sync managers.
- For extension attributes, if client requests, we must sync all of them as per documented: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/extensibility-overview?tabs=http#read-the-extension-attributes
- For custom fields, client needs to provide us the list of fields they would like to sync.
Create a group specifically for TINYpulse in Azure Active Directory
We recommend creating one group in Azure Active Directory specifically for TINYpulse, especially if you have a large organization and not everyone needs access. Use this group to prevent syncing employees who actually do not need TINYpulse and will count against your per-seat subscription size. Instead of inviting and deactivating employees directly in TINYpulse, you can simply add or remove them from the AD group and they will be synced for you.
See the Azure AD documentation for Managing Groups for detailed instructions on how to create a new Azure AD group for your TINYpulse application.