How to migrate Custom MDF objects to other Successfactors Instance

Background:

Instance Synchronization Tool is one recommended solution for Customer using which objects of one instance can be copied to another within the same Customer landscape. A week before I was working on MDF basics and this is one of the part which I tried to explore as well. I found no such documents which describes this tool in details starting from enabling it in provisioning to set up the permission in instances. So I thought of consolidating my findings in a single blog for easy reference. While writing this blog, I have discussed on some points with Luke Marson in his blog Extending SuccessFactors with the Metadata Framework to find out that this is only applicable in customer instances and for demo instances assigned to Provisioning user. That helped me a lot in understanding the functionality of this tool.

Customers can use the Instance Sync Tool to migrate their configurations from one instance to another. The sync tool acts as a push model. The source instance selectively chooses configuration objects to push to the target instance.

How to enable the Instance Synchronization Tool in Provisioning:

• Login to Provisioning and select the company for which the tool needs to be enabled.

• Go to Company settings:

• Check the option “Instance Synchronization Tool”

• For enabling the MDF data synchronization using the tool also select the option “Enable MDF Data sync via Instance Sync Tool”

Configure the target instance for Instance Synchronization Tool:

• In provisioning, select the source instance (instance where the tool needs to be enabled) and select “Instance Synchronization company Permissions”

• Here we can add target instances for this company. They can be the instances in the same data center or in different data center.

• In this case, we have selected the instance on the same data center.

• On selecting the instance, a new window opens up for providing the object types that needs to be pushed to this target from source instance.

• Select the relevant options as per requirements and save the form. This completes the configuration steps under provisioning.

Setting up permission in instance for using the tool:

• For the given instance, go to “Manage Permission Roles” from Admin Tools and open the system administration permission page

• In this window, now the new option should be there – “Manage Instance Synchronization” is. Select the permission and choose the object types that needs to be synced with the target instance.

Configuration Objects Supported:

We can transfer the following configuration objects in the Instance Sync tool:

• PM Templates
• Goal Templates
• Families and Roles
• Competency Libraries
• Picklists
• Route Maps
• Rating Scales
• Form Label Translations
• RBP Roles
• RBP Groups
• Dashboard Settings
• System Properties Settings
• MDF Picklists
• MDF Object Definitions
• MDF Configuration UI
• MDF Rules

How to launch the tool:

• From the admin tools, select “Synchronize Instance Configurations”.

• This opens a new wizard for synchronization tool. We need to select the instance where the objects need to be pushed.

Please note that this tool only works to sync from one customer instance to another. We can’t sync from a demo instance to a customer instance. As currently I am not having any customer instance for running this, I am not able to show the synchronization steps inside the tool.

Example:

Simulation Wizard:

• For Test Sync: No configurations are actually transferred. The test sync is then sent to the monitor. You can check the simulation results in the monitor.

Run Sync Now: This is for actual synchronization

Instance Synchronization Monitor tool:

• There is a monitor available in the Admin Tools that displays the progress of a sync operation. Additionally, you can use the monitor to view the summary of the objects that were transferred, that is, pass or fail. All administrators who have access to the sync tool have access to this monitor in Admin Tools:

• The Instance Synchronization Monitor Tool displays as follows: There are options to check both test sync as well as actual sync

Example showing the sync job  for given time instances;

Description of the fields in Monitoring Tool: