title: Sign up and connect your first directory in 5 minutes category: Getting Started tags: getting started, quickstart, sign up, connect directory, cloud priority: Critical
Sign up and connect your first directory in 5 minutes
Certification Center is cloud SaaS. There is nothing to download, no server to stand up, and no professional-services project to schedule. You sign up, verify your email, land in your own isolated cloud workspace, connect a directory read-only, and see results the same day. This guide takes you end to end.
What you need
- A work email address
- A modern web browser
- Admin access to one directory you want to certify (Active Directory, Entra ID, Google Workspace, AWS IAM, or a SCIM 2.0 source), or someone who can grant it
You do not need to install anything, and you do not need every directory ready on day one. One read-only connection is enough to see value.
Step 1: Sign up
- Go to the Certification Center site and start the self-serve signup
- Enter your work email and create your account
- Signup provisions an isolated cloud workspace for your organization automatically. Each customer gets its own workspace with its own data, from the first minute
Step 2: Verify your email
- Check your inbox for the verification message
- Click the link to confirm your address
- This activates your workspace and signs you in
If the email does not arrive within a few minutes, check spam, then see the Troubleshooting section below.
Step 3: Land in your workspace
After verifying, you arrive in your own workspace. This is your isolated cloud tenant: your directories, your identities, your certification history, separated from every other customer. There is nothing to configure at the infrastructure level, it is already running.
Take a moment to note where the main areas live:
| Area | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Connections | Link your directories so identities flow in |
| Access reviews | Run certification campaigns |
| License monitoring | Spot unused Microsoft 365 and Entra licenses |
| Policies | Separation of Duties and governance rules |
Step 4: Connect a directory (read-only)
Connect one directory to start. Every connector begins read-only, so this step only reads who has access, it never changes your directory.
- Go to Connections and choose to add a connection
- Pick the directory type you want to certify:
| Directory | Follow this guide |
|---|---|
| Entra ID | Connecting to Entra ID |
| Google Workspace | Connect Google Workspace |
| AWS IAM | Connect AWS IAM |
| SCIM 2.0 source | Connect a directory over SCIM 2.0 |
| Active Directory | Active Directory connection guides |
- Grant the least-privilege read permissions for that connector. See Least-privilege permissions for each connector for the exact shape (an Entra app registration with read directory scopes, a Google service account with domain-wide read, an AWS read-only role, or a SCIM bearer token)
- Use Test connection to confirm it authenticates
- Run the first sync
Step 5: See your results
Once the sync finishes, your workspace shows what it found:
- Identities under governance — the people whose access you can now certify
- Orphaned accounts — accounts with no matching person, a classic clean-up target
- Duplicate identities — the same person represented in more than one directory
- License waste (if you connected Microsoft 365 or Entra) — assigned licenses with no recent sign-in activity
From here you can run your first access review. See Creating an Access Review Campaign.
Troubleshooting
- Verification email did not arrive — Check spam and confirm the address you entered. If it is still missing after a few minutes, email support@certification-center.com.
- Connector test fails — The permissions or credential are usually the cause. Re-check the connector's setup guide and Least-privilege permissions for each connector.
- No identities appear after sync — Confirm the connection is enabled and the read scopes were granted, then re-run the sync.
- For connector-specific errors, see Troubleshooting cloud directory connections.