On October 9, 2021, SAP released documentation for the H2 2021 release. Preview release is October 15 and production is November 19. In this article we take a quick look at the latest updates for SAP SuccessFactors Platform. It’s a huge list for Platform this release – so we’ve tried to summarize the most interesting items. You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here. For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here. Let’s get started! We’ve categorized the enhancements below for you starting with the most compelling in our opinion!
Of Special Interest
What stood out to me as the most interesting part of this release is the introduction of a Digital Assistant! As with most digital assistants, the feature is basically a natural language processing program that appears in the form of a chat window. Right now SAP is reporting they have over 250 scenarios programmed on the web version and over 20 on the mobile app. This feature is currently only available to early adopters.
What Everyone Needs to Know
In this release, SAP announced a Tenant Preferred Time Zone feature. SAP is migrating servers to the UTC timezone. If you want to keep your server time zone where it is today, check out the link here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/d5e86fa8bb564058820592217d3a21d4.html
The Center of Capabilities continues to expand its functionality. There is now a proficiency rating scale available that allows you to quantify the skill level of employees in the skills within the Center of Capabilities. There are also a new Center of Capabilities Library Reports for Stories in People Analytics.
There have also been some general UI Enhancements to the center of capabilities functionality overall. In addition, the capabilities portfolio is now available which is the main experience that shows the list of capabilities for a worker.
There are a large number of new To-Do Tasks across all modules available on the latest home page. Examples are shown below. Check out the full list here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/34c3515e0de14431b35d76525dfb00df.html
In addition, there are a lot more Quick Actions available on the latest homepage. For example, there is a My Team quick action for managers to review info and take actions on their team members. Clock Time lets you clock in and out. Complete Payroll tasks, Delegate Workflows, My Profile, Org Chart, View Admin Alerts, and View Team Absences all pretty much do exactly what you would expect them to do as well. You can check out the full details here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/f6d92d1c4a834f29b8b1998c7b845d1b.html
Also the header page now conforms to Fiori standards. This is always great news to me to see more and more parts of the system align with Fiori – have you notices how much better the web system looks on your mobile phone these days? That’s thanks to Fiori!
If you are still on the V12 Employee Profile, its time to move to the latest employee profile! This functionality is finally deleted.
Security
Certificate-Based authentication is now supported for standard third party integration packages for Boomi and CPI. My sources inside SAP tell me that certificate-based authentication will be the preferred method of authentication going forward for interfaces in general. Aligned to this, SAP also announced the depication of HTTP Basic Authentication for APIs. End of maintenance is November 19, 2021 and deletion will be November 1, 2022! Get your certificates ready!
You can also now Restrict API Access to Specific Users through OAuth 2.0. Additionally, you can now restrict individual user’s login to specific IP addresses. These allow for an extra layers of security in your integrations and general user access.
Also of Note
There were also some minor curiosities for me in this batch of platform enhancements that I thought were pretty…pretty good! For example, you can now provide a Zip file for the job that updates employee photos en masse. Before this was a bear for anyone who suffered through putting a bunch of uncompressed photos on an SFTP server and waited for the large data transfer!
There’s also deep linking now available to go straight to someone’s employee profile. I could see this being useful for succession planners or managers talking about employees and wanting to share their profiles.
The employee import email also now includes a new troubleshooting section to help you figure out what went wrong on the import. Nice!
Conclusion
The SAP SuccessFactors product continues to grow and become increasingly more robust! This does not represent all of the enhancements in the H2 2021 release – only the highlights we found most compelling. Check out the What’s New Viewer here for the complete list of enhancements.
See this great article for useful information on how to prepare for a SAP SuccessFactors Regular Release.
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