SAP Identity Management 8.0: SuccessFactors Connector

SAP Identity Management 8.0 – the new major version of the product was just released and now is available for download on the SAP Service Marketplace.

As can be expected of a new major release – the product contains many enhancements along with some key new features.

Starting with the IdM Designtime –  IdM Developers can now benefit from a completely new development environment based on Eclipse – the new IdM Development Studio.  Going further – in the new version IdM continues to extend its integration capabilities with SAP products introducing a SuccessFactors connector (SFSF connector). I should also mention here improvements like  the new security concept and new process editor, as well as some renovations in repository and dispatcher management.

Of all the new features above in this blog I would like to focus on an overview of the SuccessFactors connector. We will take  a look at the two business scenarios that are supported as well as go into some more details about the new packaging concept and how the SFSF

connector is delivered as part of the SAP Provisioning Framework.

SuccessFactors, an SAP Company, is a global provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) software with its cloud offering Employee Central (EC).

On one side – like any HCM system, Employee Central is the leading system of record for employee data.  On the other side – SAP Identity Management is the leading system of record about identities, their data and privileges. So far in version 7.2 SAP IdM offered identity management processes around the on-premise SAP HCM solution. In IdM 8.0 we provide similar processes for Employee Central.  With the SuccessFactors connector we cover two main scenarios:

• Identity propagation if initiated from SuccessFactors

• Identity propagation is initiated from SAP Identity Management

In  the first scenario  SFSF EC is a central employee system and we have enabled identity propagation to be initiated from SuccessFactors. (Figure 1). For this we have implemented a pull mechanism in delta mode via scheduled Initial / Delta Load Job.

Figure 1

The other scenario that is targeted is the one where we have IdM as a Central system that initiates identity propagation. Here SAP IdM uses the SuccessFactors role-based permission concept and is used to assign users to roles and groups in SuccessFactor in a similar way like for any other system in the landscape (Figure 2). This way customers of SAP IdM are able to extend their SAP IdM deployment with SuccessFactors. This scenario could be used regardless of whether SFSF Employee Central is the leading HCM system or not.

Figure 2

The SuccessFactors  connector is shipped as a separate package in SAP Identity Management 8.0’s Provisioning Framework. Introducing the new packaging concept in IdM 8.0 (for more details you can check what Fedya posted here) now you can consume it via importing the package that is called com.sap.idm.connector.sfsf – com.sap.idm.connector.sfsf.idmpck.

As you can see on Figure 3 the connector consists of the following components:

• An SFSF repository type.

• Jobs and processes that control provisioning from and to SuccessFactors.

To configure the SuccessFactors connector, you have to create a repository and run an Initial Load job.

For more information and details about the configuration you can take a look at the new extended Configuration Guide that we have prepared for IdM 8.0.

Figure 3

Further interesting information for the IdM 8.0 release could be found in the SAP Identity Management 8.0 Release Highlights and in SAP Identity Management 8.0 Developer Studio Eclipse Plug-in