SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release Analysis

The following post was originally posted to LinkedIn on 15 May 2020.

SAP have begun a new phasing for their 2020 releases by moving to a biannual release. Unfortunately, much like everything else, the COVID-19 global pandemic has put a little bit of a kink in the plans. In an attempt to accommodate customers who were hit hardest by the pandemic, SAP has extended the systems preview phase of the release by three weeks to give organisations more time to try and get the requisite testing carried out. The release to preview systems occurred on the weekend of 15 April 2020, and the release to production systems will now take place on the weekend of 5 June 2020.

But what does the H1 release bring? Does it bring two quarter’s worth of features? Perhaps a little more since SAP haven’t had to support a Q1 release? Well, if the raw figures are anything to go by, in comparison to last year it is actually fewer. But here’s the thing. There are quite a few big features. I suspect the complexity of some of the features is also something to be considered. SAP have had longer to work on SuccessFactors, uninterrupted by other releases, so perhaps this has simply given them the opportunity to pick off some of the bigger tasks? It still doesn’t quite fit to the last roadmap I saw, and we have seen various challenges pop-up in the last few months, not the least of which is COVID-19. I suspect the truth is that there have been many mitigating factors that have resulted in SAP brining forward fewer changes than we would have perhaps initially expected, but I promise you, there are quite a few in this release that have been well worth the wait.

In previous years, SAP has released documents an run specific webinars for partners to help them understand the coming changes. This year however, SAP have adopted a new approach based on feedback from both customers and partners. This time, release notes were delivered via a new “What’s New Release Viewer” system, supported by a limited number of video demonstrations, and Q&A webinars. In addition, several of the areas also received separate sets of update information. Learning for example almost received an entire system’s worth of new documentation.

As a result, for my Zalaris colleagues and I, it has been ‘a bit of a journey’ adapting to the new approach and assimilating and analysing the greater volume of information has taken that much longer. Whereas other partners quickly turned around and pulled out the information to share, we took our alternative approach of going that bit deeper, drawing on a broader set of sources and our experiences, all in the cause of bringing you all what I consider to be the de facto review of the release.

Over the course of this last week, Zalaris has been published a set of articles each day. Each article in a PDF format and available to download for free, with no registration, to view offline. As I always endeavour to do, I’d like to share with you a list of the download pages for these articles, along with the accompanying updates from Stephen Burr, Head of Professional Services UK & Ireland for Zalaris.

If you do find any of these articles useful please consider paying it forward, and re-sharing this post with your colleagues, network and online followers, who will no doubt thank you for it. It takes a lot of time and effort to analyse the updates and write these articles, and we would like them to be as much use to the entire community as possible, so your help in passing them on to those who need them is greatly appreciated.

Series Introduction

  • Introduction to the SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release by Stephen Burr.

SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release: Part 1 of 5

SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release: Part 2 of 5

SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release: Part 3 of 5

SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release: Part 4 of 5

SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release: Part 5 of 5

  • Suite Integration, by Stephen Hammond.
  • Employee Central Service Centre, by Stephen Millard.

Series Summary

For those organisations interested in Employee Central Service Centre, that's still on a quarterly release cycle, but can still get the update details for the Q1 2020 update.

SuccessFactors Q1 2020 Release: ECSC

Author: Stephen Millard
Tags: | successfactors | linkedin | zalaris |

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