24 May 2020
SAP has been pushing hard over the last couple of years to up their game regarding mobile support. The ever more mobile global workforce’s need to be able to operate effectively via SuccessFactors has been increasing, and while the COVID-19 situation that has seen many geographic regions subjected to restricted mobility, the use for mobile has not subsided. Mobile continues to be a key operational channel.
2019 saw a general parity in features achieved across the mobile platforms. Judging by the monthly mobile app releases for 2020 thus far, it seems that SAP has shifted to bringing more of the web application features to their mobile applications.
Read More23 May 2020
It is time for the patient users of SuccessFactors Learning to be rewarded. After what seems like an aeon, the release of a new administrator user interface into production use is in sight, and organisations with access to preview systems can get their hands on a fresh new version of SuccessFactors Learning right now. And it is not just a new lick of paint. This really is a ground-up rebuild of a large chunk of functionality, and that brings many additional benefits rather than just cosmetic changes.
This update is long-awaited, and it is critical. The legacy of the Plateau system from which SuccessFactors Learning comes is such, that to deliver a flexible interface, it was developed in a web technology created by Adobe. A technology known as Flash.
Flash has been famously plagued with issues around security and performance, to the point where even Adobe has thrown in the towel. The bell sounds on Flash at the end of this year with all major browsers pulling mainstream support. Therefore, a full replacement administrator interface must be in place for SuccessFactors Learning before then.
Read More12 Apr 2020
Back in 2017, Spotify made a rather curious change to their web player app. They made some changes to stop it working in the Safari browser. The native Mac app was still there, but if you wanted to web it up, you needed another web browser. Now I used to be Chrome all the way on both Mac and PC, but since I got a new MacBook Pro last year which actually had what seems to be a reasonable battery life (compared to its nine-ten year old predecessor), I figured a switch to a power optimised native browser was worth considering. But this presented me with a bit of a challenge for a particular use case I have.
Read More04 Apr 2020
Drafts is utilitarian text app available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that I use frequently. To say I’m a daily user would not do justice to the app. As the tag line says this is the app where text starts, and that’s certainly true of my use cases. It provides a quick point of capture and powerful tools to let me do more with the text to prepare and send it to its final destination than any other app possible could; and that says a lot when you look at apps like Keyboard Maestro, Text Soap and Sublime Text!
In the latest release (version 19) of the app on macOS, developer Greg Pierce (aka AgileTortoise) has significantly extended the automation and processing scope through the addition of AppleScript, and in this post I’m going to walk you through some example set-ups related to this.
Read More27 Mar 2020
The first SuccessFactors release of 2020 is just around the corner, and with it will come the release of the new SuccessFactors Learning administrator user interface.
In case you have not yet thought about your preparations for the transition to the new interface, I would like to draw your attention to the SAP transition guide and FAQ, and provide the following suggestions which I hope that you will find useful in planning your activities.
Read More23 Mar 2020
My Elgato Stream Deck is a great little piece of hardware that I can have dynamically offer up differing controls depending upon the application I’m working with, and the type of work I’m doing. For my MacBook Pro use, it is generally on my home office desk as an alternative to the Touch Bar which is less easy to view, and I also use it almost daily with my work PC. But, there are occasions, COVID-19 restrictions aside, when it is useful to take my Stream Deck with me. It certainly elevates my PC usage and makes jumping around non-linear PowerPoint presentations much easier. For the MacBook Pro, my Touch Bar is usually sufficient, but sometimes I want the Stream Deck with me so that I can create things for and utilise it directly. But simply slinging my Stream Deck into my backpack for my travels would not give it much life before it inevitably broke, and for that reason I decided to purchase some Stream Deck armour.
Read More22 Feb 2020
Last year I finally made my big web site move from Squarespace to Github Pages. In that post I went into some of the background of the move, and while the vast majority of things have improved in terms of my requirements, one thing has been much worse. For the site I use a static web site generator known as Jekyll. It works by converting various configuration templates and content files into a web site. Locally, on my Macbook Pro, I tend to use an incremental generation during my testing and within a few seconds it churns out the new site. With a full site generation it actually takes closer to a minute. This site is many hundreds of cross referenced pages, so it takes a while.
When I upload the content to Github Pages, which also utilises Jekyll, it takes even longer. Minutes in fact. This is where it falls down in comparison to Squarespace. I don’t get a near instant publish. This means that I could inadvertently post links too soon, or I have to check back to see if it has published yet. Sometimes, there can even be failures (very few and far between fortunately). This has been an annoyance for a few months now, and so I recently took a look at creating something to help me with this.
Read More21 Feb 2020
While SAP SuccessFactors has now moved from quarterly to bi-annual releases, SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) remains on a quarterly release schedule. This means that Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) continues to get quarterly updates on the C4C-side of the solution, with updates to other solution components following the SuccessFactors release timelines.
In this article, I’ll briefly cover some of the features that have reached general availability before examining many of the enhancements relevant to employee service use. Particularly surprising is the number of enhancements in this release are related to e-mails in and out of the system.
Read More08 Feb 2020
I’ve been a Google Chrome user for many years, but with my regular use of i*OS and spending more time using my Macbook Pro out and about, battery life management and sharing of bookmarked sites across device has become more important for my everyday use. As a result, I’ve been using Safari as my default Mac web browser.
But there are a few tab management features that I was missing from Chrome, so a while back I set about adding those in using some of the tools I had at my disposal.
Read More19 Jan 2020
Working with shell scripting is in essence very similar to programming in a more traditional compile-to-run language. The key differences for me are the depth of access and that it is interpreted. On occasion the scripting commands available simply don’t do everything you might want in one simple to execute command, and so, just like any other areas of coding, you can go down the path of creating your own functions and shorthand. In this post I’m going to share a few functions I’m using for adding content to the Mac clipboard/pasteboard.
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