Litera Took the Manual Handoff Out of Its Workday-to-Active Directory Sync With Files.com

Litera builds document drafting, review, and workflow software for the legal industry. Its products run inside 99% of the Am Law 100, the highest-grossing law firms in the United States, and serve more than 15,000 customers worldwide, from global firms to corporate legal departments. The company got to that position in large part by buying: 24 acquisitions in five years, each one bringing new products, new systems, and new people into the fold.

That pace of acquisition turns a routine piece of IT plumbing into load-bearing infrastructure. Every acquired company means a wave of employees to provision, consolidate, and reorganize, and all of that traffic crosses one connection: the link between Workday, the HR system of record, and Active Directory, the directory that decides what each of those people can access.

“Litera just went through a crazy five years, 24 companies acquired, and all of us have come from an acquisition.”

Identity Data Crossed Between Workday and Active Directory by Hand

Workday and Active Directory do not exchange data directly, and Litera had bridged that gap with a person. To keep the directory in step with the HR system, someone in IT moved the import and export files between the two platforms manually. Every new hire, departure, and change of role passed through that handoff, at a company whose workforce was being reshaped by one acquisition after another. The step was slow, it depended on specific people being available, and it turned what ought to have been plumbing into somebody's job.

The arrangement persisted because neither system offers the other a place to connect. Workday delivers files through its own built-in SFTP client and authenticates with an X.509 certificate, a certificate-and-key login rather than a password. Active Directory's synchronization needs a dependable location where it can collect imports and drop exports. Bridging the two takes an always-available endpoint that both sides can authenticate to. A shared drive cannot do that job, and neither can a person with a downloads folder.

An Exchange Point Both Systems Could Authenticate To

As acquisitions kept adding people, the handoff needed to become a pipeline. The requirements were plain: an SFTP endpoint Workday's client could authenticate to with its certificate, folders the Active Directory synchronization could read and write on its own schedule, and no custom development on either side. Litera selected Files.com to be that exchange point.

Workday's SFTP client delivers HR export files directly into Files.com, authenticating with its X.509 certificate and private key. The Active Directory synchronization connects to the same Files.com folders over SFTP, collects what Workday dropped, and writes its own import and export files back. Files.com sits in the middle as storage both platforms trust, so a file that leaves the HR system reaches the directory with no person in between.

Identity Sync Runs With Nobody in the Loop

With the Files.com layer in production, Litera replaced a manual courier step with a system-to-system pipeline.

• Identity data moves between Workday and Active Directory with nobody carrying files by hand. The intermediary role is gone.
• The synchronization no longer waits on a person being available, so provisioning keeps pace with a workforce that acquisitions keep reshaping.

From Human Courier to Files.com Pipeline

Today the connection between the system that hires Litera's people and the system that grants them access runs on its own, through Files.com. Where a change in the workforce once meant someone in IT ferrying files between two platforms that could not reach each other, it now means an export lands in a folder and the synchronization picks it up. For an IT team absorbing the people of 24 acquired companies, that is the difference between a pipeline that runs and a task that has to be remembered.