As announced on the recent SuccessConnect event in Las Vegas - it's possible to build SuccessFactors BizX extension scenarios, based on . As of SuccessFactors 1311 release, among many other features, this is now officially rolled out to customers and partners.
I'm sure many of you already have ideas about what scenario would best fit to your company or you clients - aspects like company car management, benefits and health safety, time tracking, etc. easily come to mind. And that's really great. We get quite some ideas from colleagues and we're in progress of developing a number of extensions internally.
Getting access
What is essential to all of those scenarios are the set of prerequisites which stand on the way, before you can see your first extension running:
- SuccessFactors and SAP HANA Cloud Platform - those are relatively easy to get as part of our SAP Cloud Applications Partner center program. Both need in addition some initial configuraton content.
- Subscription to SAP HANA Cloud Portal - in order to get smooth and slick extension UI - we recommend Cloud Portal layer, which besides branding/retheming, also covers 1st and 2nd level native SuccessFactors navigation.
- SucessFactors Provisioning access in order to configure your SFSF instance - in case you seriously plan to engage in customer projects going forward - this indeed requires that you go through a SuccessFactors partner training.
- API documentation, outlining the functionality you can access using the SuccessFactors APIs.
Among many other materials - all of those are of course available to SuccessFactors and HCP partners.
API demo access
While actively supporting partners to develop and productize their extension applications - we'd also like to invite more developers to engage on the topic of SuccessFactors extensions. Developing those should be really easy based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform free developer accounts and we'll further lower the bar to enable develoeprs to experiment with the system. Building experience and prototype future applications based on SAP HCP Trial should be the default choice for developers interested in extending SuccessFactors. For that purpose we're happy to announce public demo API access to a SuccessFactors Trial system.
Starting today you can:
- Clone the Benefits application we've released a month ago among the other HCP samples on GitHub
- Run it end-to-end on a local server, using the SAP HCP Development Server for local development
- Run it end-to-end on SAP HCP Trial landscape
- In both cases you'll be using the provided SuccessFactors trial system for API access.
- Read more details on the SuccessFactors OData API, released in 1305 release and consistently improved every quater so far.
- In order to have a configurable, automatically rethemable extension - you'll use the Trial Cloud Portal service and create a portal site around your application, thus integrating with 1-st and 2-nd level SuccessFactors navigation.
We've made that end-to-end integrated scenario available as part of our 6-week long Intro to SAP HCP openSAP course.
More details on how to get the application up and running are available in the Benefits sample project readme.
API demo limitations
Please keep in mind the following SuccessFactors demo API access limitations:
- Our SuccessFactors API demo system offers only OData API access. It's not possible to login interactively to the SuccessFactors system. It's not possible to use SF API or Jam API (yet).
- You can't change the underlying SuccessFactors system data - for the sake of our openSAP course and getting reproducible experience - it's restricted to read-only operations for now.
- You'll use your HCP-trial user to connect to the SuccessFactors system. Under the hood we'll transparently map that to a pre-defined SuccessFactors user in order to ensure that all of you have consistent experience going though the Benefits sample. In other words - all the "my profile", "my team", etc queries will always return the details of one of the same user, regardless who has logged in to the system.
- In case you decide to explore further and make queries of the profiles of other users by name - this will work fine. There are more than 300 demo-data users in the system, whom you can experiment with.
- You can't create new MDF object definitions (yet). This will come with subsequent releases of our SuccessFactors API demo system.
Have fun coding and keep us posted on your findings.
