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26 Jun 2018
A lot of my work revolves around documentation and in business, Microsoft Word documents still rule. Word of course comes with it’s own built-in version tracking feature, but by default this feature is enabled. It has to be purposefully enabled as it can make documents confusing and cumbersome for those who don’t fully understand how to use it. Unfortunately from time to time, people send me document revisions where they have neglected to enable track changes, and it is important to identify what has actually changed. In these scenarios, we can fall back to Word’s document compare feature to identify the changes.
Normally, you would open Word, navigate to each file in turn and trigger the compare. This is all fine and good, but as someone who is usually working with the files directly in XYplorer (my Windows file manager of choice), I figured it was more efficient to trigger it from within the app.
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15 Jun 2018
My colleagues and I at Zalaris have been hard at work once again analysing the information from SAP in relation to the SAP SuccessFactors update that dropped into production environments this last weekend (3 June 2018). We try to distil the wealth of information available into the core aspects that we feel customers and those with an interest in keeping up to date with SuccessFactors can really benefit from. We share our thoughts and insights alongside the news of what’s new and what’s changing in order to ensure you understand the benefits and impact each release brings.
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29 May 2018
With the second release of 2018, SAP SuccessFactors is releasing a handful of notable updates for Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC).
19 May 2018
The BBC Micro:Bit (or MicroBit) is a great, cheap piece of kit for budding coders. It isn’t Raspberry Pi Zero, but it is geared around helping develop coding skills in visual blocks, JavaScript, or Python that you can see interacting on the device without the need to have lots of additional hardware. It has LEDs, GPIO pins, buttons, a gyroscope, some rudimentary options for measuring temperatures and light levels. It’s just a solid little gadget that can be found in many UK schools today. I’ve been using them as an option for my children for coding and experimenting for some time, and there are some rough edges - particularly around streamlining the process of getting the compiled code onto the device.
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26 Apr 2018
Do you use SAP SuccessFactors? Well if you do and you haven’t already read through the quarterly release review articles from Zalaris, then you really should. The team go in depth on a module by module basis picking out the key things that customers need to know about.
Find out what the impact will be on you and your organisation. Get tips on what features and options to use and what you might want to steer clear of or simply ignore at this point.
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20 Apr 2018
Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) is an unusual SuccessFactors solution in that it isn’t really a single module. Rather it is a combination of modules that integrate with SuccessFactors to provide an HR service desk with self-service functionality as well as the usual incident* management functionality.
* If ‘incidents’ seems an unfamiliar term, it may be that they are known simply as ‘tickets’ or ‘cases’ in your organisation.
As a result, there are different stages at which updates are applied to different systems and in turn, ECSC can receive updated functionality in a staggered manner. However, by the time this post is released all of the details should be applicable to production ECSC systems.
Whilst there are many integrations, hooks and instances of building on top of other systems involved in deploying and running ECSC I’ll be specifically covering the following areas in this review of the Q1 2018 releases.
06 Apr 2018
In my work, I work with PDFs on a daily basis. Typically I’m generating them as documentation, or reading documentation. But I also occasionally work with PDFs in different ways. Pulling out pages, replacing them with others, or building entirely new ones. When I’m doing that on my work laptop running windows, I fall back to using the PDF Toolkit utility. Whilst there are visual interfaces to use this tool I most often identify a need to do something with a PDF when I’m working with the file itself. For that reason I’ve created some XYplorer scripts that make accessing common PDF manipulations even easier.
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24 Mar 2018
Another quick but useful script for the Windows file manager XYplorer today when using it alongside my favourite screenshot application on Windows, Greenshot.
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04 Feb 2018
Whilst I’m not a presenter on radio or podcast show, I do actually spend a fair amount of time speaking to people via my computers. I join conference calls, webinars and everything in between. For this I have my trusty Blue Yeti microphone. Not a top of the line microphone, but a notable improvement over the USB Jabra Speakerphone I used previously; though I still use this as my speaker and as my travel microphone.
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20 Jan 2018
Today I’m going to share an XYplorer script for combining files through concatenation - i.e. merging them together by appending the files to one another in order to create a new combined file. Whilst it isn’t the sort of script I use everyday it does speed up the occasions when I need to combine plain text based files into a single file; in my case often for post-test data loading.
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