Hana Cloud Integration and SuccessFactors Integration Center

Because Nextmoves, the company I work for, is currently involved in a couple of SuccessFactors implementation projects, my eye was caught by the latest release notes for SuccessFactors. In release 1508 there will be an Integration Center within SuccessFactors. I thought it would be a good idea to see what kind of integration options are available in the SuccessFactors Integration Center and off course I want to share my experience with you.
The description in the release notes is as follows:

Integration Center enables Non-IT users to easily build, deploy and manage outbound file based integrations themselves using a fun and intuitive user interface within SuccessFactors Admin UI.

I am very curious what that fun interface means, let’s see!

Setting up SF IC

First of all, you need to activate the SuccessFactors Integration Center (SF IC) in your provisioning, which is something your SuccessFactors admin can do for you (a link to the official SAP documentation is at the end of this blog). There is no extra license fee for the IC, it comes with the SuccessFactors Foundation module.
After the Integration Center is activated in provisioning you can select it in your admin tools:

The first thing you see on the welcome screen are the tiles with the different options.

* Browse Integration Catalog
* Create a New Integration
* Edit my integrations
* Import an Integration From a File
* Monitor Integrations

I am going to focus on the ‘Create a New Integration’ tile, but I will cover the other tiles briefly.

Browse Integration Catalog

This tile brings you to the overall Cloud Integration catalog. In here you will find pre-packaged integrations for SuccessFactors but also for other applications. When I wrote this blog there were seven SF IC flows available, but I’m guessing this number will grow over time.

Create a new Integration

The first thing when creating a new integration is to choose from which entity you want to extract data. When selecting an entity it will show a preview of the fields in the entity. I’m going for the entity ‘User’ and choose select.

After selecting the right entity we can see we have to go through six steps to complete our integration. The subjects of the steps and the fields in the first step seem really self-explanatory. 

When you’ve filled in the required fields and choose next it may take some time for the system to gather the information. When the calculation is done, the screen will give you a preview of the data. Here you can edit fields, re-arrange them, remove them and add a lot of filters and sorting options.

On a side note; you can save the integration while configuring it and I suggest you do. It seems that the standard SuccessFactors log-off-when-idle time can interrupt your creation before you finished it.

Maybe this looks familiar to you as we discussed this in my second blog: Starting with Hana Cloud Integration? Create a simple integration flow (iFlow)!

Just play around  with these settings and when you’re ready choose next to see a preview of what you created.  If you like what you see in the preview choose next so we can enter the SFTP settings.

The fields in this step are also clear. Enter your SFTP address, enter your credentials and choose a file name and place. This is almost exactly the same as the sFTP adapter option in HCI.

The next step is to schedule. You can choose not to Schedule the integration so you can run it once.

The review and run step is the final step of the process. Here you can check the created integration and run it.

Under the Save button (which I mentioned earlier) there are some more options. You can export the Integration definition as well as the specifications, you can download the preview. One other thing that is worth mentioning is the Audit History Log. Here you can view your previously saved versions of your integration. If you mess up and know that version 4 of the integration was working fine, just go on with that one!

Edit my integrations

Here you can find previously created integrations and edit them.

Import an Integration From a File

Let’s try to import an integration from a file. First we need to go to the catalog and download a integration for SF IC. I filtered on supported platform (SF IC) and went with the Telephone and Location template.

Select the tile and go to the documents tab:

Select the document, choose Download and save it on your disk.

When you saved the integration go to the Import an Integration From a File tile and select your downloaded integration. Choose upload and you will be in the same screen as when we created our own integration. But when you select “preview” you see that the download integration selected a couple of fields, which also contain the location and phone numbers. You can easily add and modify fields, or upload another integration if that suites your needs.

Monitor Integrations

When going into the monitor integrations we see a nice HCI-WEBUI looking monitoring. You can see the jobs that have been triggered from the Integration Center, jobs that you scheduled and jobs that have been triggered from Dell Boomi.

When you click on a process name, for example the one that casued an error, you will get detailed information of the job. If you entered an incorrect sFTP adress you will see the error in there.

For scheduled jobs it is possible to add an email address to receive status updates after the job has finished. In the Schedule tab, when you choose an occurrence other than ‘none’ you get the option to enter an email address.
This is only an information mail, the actual data will be stored on your sFTP server. The title of the mail will be something like:

And that was all. I hope this blog helped you along with the SF IC, if you’ve got any more questions do not hesitate to contact me:

bob@nextmoves.nl
www.nextmoves.nl

You can find the official SAP User Guide for Integration Center here.

Blog 1: Starting with Hana Cloud Integration? Keep this in mind!
Blog 2: Starting with Hana Cloud Integration? Create a simple integration flow (iFlow)!

Blog 3: Deep dive in Hana Cloud Integration.

Blog 4: Hana Cloud Integration and SuccessFactors Integration Center

Blog 5: Hana Cloud Integration in comparison to Dell’s Boomi.