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ChrisSolomon
Active Contributor

     Hey you guys and girls, have any of you heard of this thing called Facebook?!?!?!? What about Twitter? LinkedIn? Google +?....I hear they are gonna be a BIG deal! (hahaha)....by this time, these "social" platforms are so common that many have found their way into Webster's Dictionary and even your parents and grandparents likely have Facebook accounts. But what does this have to do with HCM Processes and Forms (HCM P&F)? This is an old blog I had started and meant to finish up, but never had the time. It was just a little "proof of concept" (POC) that I put together for a client....it gave me a chance to "play around" a bit with something a bit outside the usually HCM P&F workload.

     In this scenario, we are referring to Adobe Interactive Forms (AIF), but you can just as easily do this with your FPM-based forms (well, not quite as easy because FPM forms do not lend themselves well to "web links" and Javascript....but you could make your own embedded component as I did with my Google Maps example *hint hint* HCM Processes & Forms: Google Maps and how to step up your FPM forms game! ).

     This idea was born out of an "employee rewards" process that I helped develop. It was around awarding a bonus to employees based on performance and after a series of approvals and so forth, the employee is notified and receives a "certificate". Since the "certificate" follows a strict format and we wanted to include specific branding, images, etc (ie. "make it pretty"), it lent itself much better to a PDF format than to using FPM layouts.

     For this example, let us consider an "employee of the month" process. It will follow typical HCM P&F configuration and development. We have a manager that picks an employee they wish to recognize as "employee of the month". They fill out their form and submit it. For the next step, we may possibly have the next higher manager that receives all of the "nominations" from each lower manager. They will then either approve or reject these (or maybe we make this an "edit" step even where they can put in a suggested "award"....maybe pick from a drop down of "gift card", $100 bonus, vacation time, etc). The approvals get routed to an HR Administrator who can then submit the "award" for the employee. In our case, let us say that the HR Admin enters a $100 one-time payment (infotype 0015) for the employee and submits the form. The backend makes the actual infotype 0015 update via workflow. After the update is a success, we now (FINALLY!!!!) route to the actual employee. Now this is where our "social media-ize" portion finally comes into play!

     Consider that the employee receives the Adobe form "Certificate" which they can print for themselves to adorn their "spacious" cubicle (as we all know is common), but on the form, we have also included a "link"/button for them to share this great honor with all of their "friends" on Facebook (which our very progressive, forward-thinking, Millennial-coddling company allows us access too):

     The user/employee clicks the "share" button, and they will then see a "pop-up" much like...

     Which then will appear on their own page once posted with "share link" as ...

     To "share" on Facebook is quite easy. You simply sign up for an "app ID" (think of this as your "public key" that identifies you to Facebook) .

App Registration and Config - App Development - Dokumente - Facebook für Entwickler

     Next, it is simply as easy as embedding your needed Javascript (or link) into your "web page" (or in this case, our Adobe Interactive Form). There are many ways to do  this but here is a simple code example in which I am writing a "string" that gets passed back from a function to provide some "inner HTML" to where we display our button:

strResponse = "<span class=""facebookshare"">"      
strResponse = strResponse & "<a href=""javascript:;"" onClick=""window.open('http://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=5555555555555" 'our App ID here
strResponse = strResponse & "&href=" & encodeURI(strFB_Link)  'this is what we want LINKED when they click our post
strResponse = strResponse & "&picture=" & encodeURI(strFB_Pic) 'this is the photo/picture we want used
strResponse = strResponse & "&title=" & encodeURI(strFB_Title) 'this is the TITLE shown (bold text)
strResponse = strResponse & "&caption=" & encodeURI("visit us at MegloGlobalCorp.com")
strResponse = strResponse & "&description=" & encodeURI(strFB_Descr) 'this is our description (the long text part)
strResponse = strResponse & "&redirect_uri=http://www.megloglobalcorp.com/social_media_share.asp"
strResponse = strResponse & "&display=popup', 'fbshare', 'width=640,height=320');"" title=""Share on Facebook!"">"
strResponse = strResponse & "</a></span>"

     Now, in your own "script" in your AIF, you can imagine that you would likely be reading several displayed/hidden fields to pull values (like employee name, position, etc) in order to dynamically construct your information that you pass the Facebook share parameters (like "title" or "description").

     You can set just about every portion of the window that shows as well as set how it should display (pop-up or new window/page) and where to redirect to once complete. There are MANY more examples you can find simply by Google-ing "Facebook share dialog". Here is Facebook's own information (thought I find other sites have better explanations):

Share Dialog - Sharing - Dokumente - Facebook für Entwickler

     Now that you understand the basics (and that no real "magic" is involved...just good ol' fashioned "web development"), you can also do the same for Twitter and just about any other social media site. Just check out their APIs, look for examples, and build your own! Has this sparked SEVERAL ideas of your own? (haha) I hope you have enjoyed this short blog and the somewhat diversion from the norm for me. As always, I will keep posting them up if you keep reading them. Till next time...

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