SAP SuccessFactors Platform H1 2022 Release Updates

SAP has announced the latest updates and changes for SuccessFactors for the first half of 2022.

Preview release was on April 15 and production will be released May 20. 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.

For tips on how to manage a release, check out our blog here.

For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new in the 1H 2022 Platform release below.

Overview

SAP continues to invest in numerous updates into the platform, topping most of the other modules for the past few releases. Due to the large number of updates (89 in this release!), we’ve highlighted only some of the most significant changes below. We’ve categorized the updates based on who the affected audience for each change: User Experience Updates, Admin Updates, and System Updates.

User Experience

SAP continues to remind customers that the Universal release of the Latest Homepage will be in June 3rd for preview and June 24th for production environments. If you haven’t reviewed the changes and opted-in, you should do so now and plan your communication strategy so your users aren’t caught wondering why their homepage changed!

SAP also continues to add more quick actions to the latest homepage, thus increase its usefulness as a quick way to access needed areas of the system without having to click through navigation. The actions added include “Candidate Talent Pools”, “Learning Administration”, “Mobile Activation”, “View Company Documents”, and “View Tile Reports”. The homepage also now allows for grouping of custom cards within the Organizational Updates section as seen in the screenshot below:

Screenshot of Card Groupings within the Organizational Updates Section

You can also see an example of the new half sized custom cards in the screenshot above.

There are also various updates to the opportunity marketplace including allowing Assignment offer approvals, allowing assignment owners to see descriptions of capabilities including proficiency levels when creating assignments and applicants to see their own capability details. The capability picker also got updates you can read about in our blog here: https://worklogix.blog/2022/04/17/sap-successfactors-1h-2022-whats-new-in-succession-and-career-development/

The org chart also got a nice update where you can change the order of direct reports below a manager. Check out the configuration steps here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/780a0273693342c79ded9930b9057110.html

You can also now turn on a data privacy consent form for uploading photos that is shown to users as in the example screenshot below:

Screenshot of data privacy consent message for employee photos

Also related to photos- you can now have just one photo for a person on global assignment with multiple employments.

After many years of service, quickcards have finally got an upgrade across the system. This gives a better look and feel consistent across the platform. An example is shown below:

Admin Updates

Do you still love to use the old admin page like me? I’m sorry to say the nostalgic use of the OneAdmin page will end on May 20th this year. Time to start using the NextGen admin page.

SAP also continues to increase the list of jobs available to monitor in the Scheduled Job Manager. You can check out the list of jobs here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/55e3deb65bf14190b102ff7ad1f803fc.html

Are you an admin that loves unstucking stuck workflows or resolving HR data issues? You might be interested in the new custom fields you can add to admin alerts! Check out the list here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/055e9cd78d2543d283fd556cbca2132d.html You can also now see the name of the current approver for stalled workflows within admin alerts.

If you are a security or compliance admin, you’ll be happy to know you can now perform read and change audit reports on multiple users for up to 30 days now. The storage limit has also been increased from 1GB to 10GB.

The still evolving transport system in SuccessFactors also got an enhancement in the form of Bundle Management in Configuration Center. You can now create bundles, edit them, and even share them with others! Checkout the screenshot below:

New Bundle Management Feature Screenshot

There’s also now a handy import history report available for download in the Configuration Center as well!

The Check tool has now been integrated into the instance refresh too. Admins will now get an email that includes a summary of check tool results when a refresh is processed and can also download an error log. The list of items the check tool checks has also been updated. The detailed list can be found here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/354e3d1428d8493d89dfb7487e5dcedf.html

Security admins will also be glad there’s a new potentially neck-saving notification when they change a role that impacts a large number of users. Don’t worry – you can select the threshold of users so you aren’t getting unwanted pop-ups! Checkout the configuration steps here: https://help.sap.com/doc/62fddbd651204629b46bbccbabf886ba/cloud/en-US/c7b923c87ca3494c8416349431fa8a49.html

The RBP admin screen also got a new facelift! You have the option to turn this one on by selecting the option on the old screen. Check it out below!

System Updates

Access to APIs based on HTTP Basic Authentication will no longer be supported on November 17 2023. This gives customers about a year and a half to adapt any existing interfaces that log on to the APIs directly to OAuth 2.0.

The APIs will now also start to be throttled. Probably a smart move on the part of SAP to keep system stability, but but news if you have interfaces that make lots of calls. Don’t worry – the limit is now 40 requests per second so you’d have to be doing A LOT of calls to be affected.

The APIs have also been enhanced with more linking between a variety of entities. Check the main What’s New Viewer page for specifics.

Wrap Up

We have now covered the Platform update highlights for 1H 2022! SAP continues to invest greatly in the platform to expand the overall capabilities of the system, concentrating on consistent and enhanced user experience while giving admins more helpful tools.

Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles? Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!

What’s New in the SuccessFactors Platform for H2 2021

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 W hat’s New Vie wer 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.

The latest home page showing the Digital Assistant chatbot in action.

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.

The settings, such as providing a unique name to the rating scale, defining the number of proficiency levels, and assigning the numerical value as 0 or 1 for the lowest proficiency level are available on the Rating Scale page of the Capabilities Portfolio Settings wizard.

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.

The Capabilities Portfolio page provides information about the capabilities assigned to a user. This page also provides users the option to navigate to the Opportunities Marketplace.

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

Example of the home page showing several pending tasks: approve job offers, approve job requisitions, approve time off requests, approve time sheets, complete calibration, and complete 360 evaluation.

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.

IP restriction can be applied to individual users.

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.

Contact info@worklogix.com for any assistance supporting and implementing your SAP SuccessFactors Modules, or download our support services brochure.

Introduction to the Metadata Framework

What is the Metadata Framework (MDF) in SAP SuccessFactors? If you’ve been introduced to SAP SuccessFactors, chances are you’ve heard the term “Metadata Framework”. But you may not know the details of what the Metadata framework is exactly. This quick blog will help you understand what comprises the “Metadata Framework”.

To get started, let’s examine the name “Metadata Framework”. “Meta” refers to a greek origin word meaning “beyond”. So the word “Metadata” refers to data beyond the data. Or in other words, Metadata is data about the data. Metadata is data that describes what type of data it is (e.g. a number, or text, or a drop down) how the data looks (e.g. how it is formatted such as a date formatted as 12-31-20 vs. December 31, 2020), what its limits are (e.g. 256 characters long), etc . As the picture at the top of the blog post suggests, a framework is the structure laid out in the initial stages of building a structure. So the “Metadata Framework” is a way to lay out the structure of data in SAP SuccessFactors.

So how do we go about laying out the data structure of SAP SuccessFactors? If you have admin access in the system, you can navigate to the “Configure Object Definitions” screen as shown in the example below. Think of an “Object” as a collection of fields that describe, define, and/or belong to a “thing” in your database/system. Objects could be a chair, a dog, a car, a person or the example below, a position. This screen demonstrates the power of the MDF because you can create objects (as seen in the upper right hand corner under “Create New”, or you can edit existing objects. This ability to create and edit objects lets you store any type of information! In our example, we chose “Object Definition” in the “Search” field and then chose “Position” so we can see how the position object has been defined. You can see below some basic data about the object in general at the top such as whether it is active or not, whether version history is kept on the MDF definition, etc. Below that begins a list of fields within the object and associated attributes of each field such as its technical identifier, length, the type of field it is, etc. Scrolling further down we can even set rules for what happens when a new object is created (such as pre-populating fields) or validation rules to help with data integrity to check fields before the object is saved. We can edit this definition of the overall object and the fields within the object by clicking “Take Action” and then “Make Correction”. Taking a look at the screenshot below, you can start to get a sense of what the MDF is all about.

It is important to note that not all data in SAP SuccessFactors uses the metadata framework. Most Employee Central data is stored in the MDF–but not all. SAP is working on moving the final few pieces into the MDF within the next few releases. Most of the Talent modules and Recruiting still also reside outside of the MDF. However, as new functionality is built, it is created using the MDF wherever practical.

We hope you enjoyed this quick tour of the MDF! You should now have a basic understanding of what the MDF is and how to configure it. Do you need more help with the MDF? Contact us at info@worklogix.com.