Insights

Zoho Directory Guidelines & 4 Main Features

The integration of Zoho People with Zoho Directory creates bundles of advantages for administrators. For example, it helps handle identity and users’ access without any hassles. You can also secure the accounts completely on this platform.

The Guidelines

1. Firstly, use your Zoho credentials to sign in via https://directory.zoho.com/
2. Then, select Settings > Integrations > Zoho Directory > Configure 
   (Notably, the Configure button will be View Details when you link Zoho People account with Zoho Directory)

3. Choose among 4 features: Single Sign-On, Security Policies, Active Directory Sync, Sign-in Activity

4 Main Features

Single sign-on

Firstly, the single sign-on feature includes the SAML technology. Enabling SAML will allow the users to authenticate themselves through their identity provider (or domain). For example, turning on SAML for zylkercorp.com will help users to log in from that domain to have verification.

Security policies

Next, security policies are a set of customizable rules that govern how your users can authenticate themselves. They consist of four components:

• Password policy dictates how strong the users’ passwords must be and how often they have to be renewed.
• MFA dictates which multi-factor authentication modes the user can use to sign in.
• Allowed IPs dictates which IP addresses the user can use to sign in. Any disallowed sign-in requests from IPs are unacceptable.
• Lastly, Session management displays how many active sessions a user can have, and for how long.

5 steps to add a security policy

1. Go to Security > Click Security Policies > select Add Security Policy
2. Set a name the policy > Choose the groups to apply for it
3. To prevent the policy from being applied to specific users in the chosen groups, add them under Exclude Users.
4. Choose a policy priority. The new policy will be placed above the chosen policy.

​Active Directory Sync

Zoho Directory Sync is a secure and straightforward directory and password synchronization tool which helps in syncing users and their passwords in Active Directory (AD) with Zoho accounts. 

Additionally, this feature enables you to delegate user authentication and management to your Active Directory or LDAP server via Zoho Directory Sync (ZDSync) tool. This tool performs a one-way synchronization from your existing LDAP server to the Admin Panel.

Thus, This enables you to maintain all your user identities in a single place, without having to add, edit, or disable user accounts manually in the Admin Panel. As the synchronization always happens from AD to Zoho, the data in AD is never compromised. 

Moreover, Zoho Directory Sync Tool Functions:

• Queries your LDAP Server
• Queries your Zoho Account
• Compares the data in the two lists
• Curates any changes during comparison
• Updates your Admin Panel with all necessary changes

Sign-in activity

Besides single sign-on and security policies, there is another feature named sign-in activity. This feature allow users to monitor active users, view recent activities. Additionally, it integrates the functions like to view user login history, see reports, etc.
To access sign-in activity feature, you can follow this guidelines:

1. First of all, select Users from the side menu to view list of all your Active users.
2. Then, click on the user whose activity you wish to track and choose Account Activity (image below)
3. After that, you will see details such as the IP address from where the user accessed Cliq and the login time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you can understand 4 main features including in Zoho Directory. With Zoho People, you can have more integration with other applications as well. Click here to get out of the most from Zoho People.

Source: Zoho