SuccessFactors | Run a report directly from a custom tile in homepage

Background:

Reports in SuccessFactors can be key for managers and management to track changes in the organization and make key decisions regarding their team. SuccessFactors’ Advanced and Adhoc reports are powerful tools to create key reports for the organization.

However, usually manager do not prefer to go all the way to Reporting, then search the report every time they want to run it, this is especially the case if they want to run the report very often. They’d like to have access to the report at a click of a button whenever they want to run it.

Scheduling the report does not fulfill the requirement as it would only send them the report on the scheduled basis.

Managers would like to access such a report from the “My Team” section in the homepage.

Issue:

It is easy to provide a link to the reporting module into a tile, but that does not help much. Furthermore, if you run a report and try to use the link in the URL, it will still take you only to the reporting homepage and not the actual report. Tile and dashboard report have limited capabilities.

Solution:

There is a way to get the URL for a particular report, that would actually run the report directly and not redirect you to the reporting homepage. In order to access the URL, please do the following:

1. As a super admin, go to your homepage
2. Find a tile called Reports, this tile would list out all the reports you have access to, in the available tab (Image 1)
3. Click on the report in question, it take you directly to the report, ready to run.
4. Copy this URL.
5. Now, create a custom tile, and move it to the appropriate section in the homepage, in the tile, use the target as a URL and use the URL from step 4. You might want to have the target open in a new tab for a better experience, if desired.
6. Save, and proxy as the end user to test it.
7. You can now directly run a report from a custom tile in the home page.

(Image 1)

Conclusion:

You now know how to make a custom tile to run reports from homepage. I have provided this solution to my clients and they found it very valuable.