28 Nov 2022
Computer systems have been managing data for us since their inception, and these days we have sophisticated systems that do so at an incredible rate and with accuracy far exceeding human standards. Many organisations stop at the out-of-the-box functionality of their systems, and make assumptions about what is and what is not possible. We are here to tell you that through the application of automation techniques even more is possible, and this is no less true for the domains of HR and payroll than for any other. In fact many HR and payroll processes are highly automatable.
The primary reason that HR and payroll departments do not explore this is because they do not full understand what investing in automation solution could deliver. In this article we are going to take at why it is worth exploring automation for HR and Payroll.
Read More27 Nov 2022
I have been using Obsidian as my personal knowledge management app of choice now for a few years, and recently I have been modifying one of my note vaults to a new indexing system. However, I stumbled across an interesting search issue with the indexing that required a bit of investigation to resolve.
Read More26 Nov 2022
My efforts to link together my documentation and automation took a little jump forward recently with a new beta of the code library utility called SnippetsLab. A small update to the user interface has enabled me to construct a basic integration with Hookmark (the app formerly known as Hook). In this post I am going to explain a bit more about this.
Read More31 Oct 2022
You may have heard of Doctor Drafts. It is my Alfred workflow for working with the app Drafts on the Mac. It has proven hugely popular, and I continue to expand and enhance the workflow as time permits. But, Doctor Drafts is already quite expansive, and more capable than people realise. While I’ve expounded in the past on how it is designed so that others can build their own custom workflows on top of Doctor Drafts, most people don’t realise that this extends beyond Alfred too. In this post, I am going to walk through how you can leverage Doctor Drafts functionality in your own scripts.
Read More30 Sep 2022
There was a recent discussion on the Drafts Slack group (used mainly by beta testers), about action editing and I shared a little trick I use for creating action templates that give me a quick start. In this post I’m going to outline the approach that will hopefully also save you time on creating new actions.
Read More31 Aug 2022
Like many computer users, I work with text a lot, and I am thankful every day for the first person who came up with the idea of copy and paste. I cannot even begin to think about how my computing life would be without this wonderful addition. But, even the clipboard can be improved, and there are clipboard manager apps that let you supercharge your workflow, giving you access to your clipboard history. With these powerful tools at my fingertips, I still found a niggle, so I fixed it with a little Keyboard Maestro macro.
Read More30 Aug 2022
Tags are commonplace in computer systems these days. They are a way to assign a piece of meta data to something that allows them to be associated with one another and usually to be searched for and filtered with. They are powerful, and in fact typically more powerful than a traditional folder structure. Tags are a brilliant concept and I use them in numerous places. However, it may be a little surprising to discover that I don’t really use them all that much in my personal knowledge management system application of choice - Obsidian. Let me explain why.
Read More08 Aug 2022
As organisations grow, reliably managing HR enquiries at scale becomes more pressing. That is where SAP’s Employee Central Service Centre solution for SuccessFactors comes into play. It allows HR to provide a single hub through which to provide support to colleagues and through which HR can track queries and activities to ensure they are dealt with in a timely and professional manner.
The solution is component-based, and as well as some general SuccessFactors infrastructure, it relies specifically on Employee Central and the SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) system’s service functionality. As a result, the solution benefits from quarterly updates for Cloud for Customer and bi-annual SuccessFactors updates. In this post, I will look at how the updates to Cloud for Customer in Q1 and Q2 2022 and the Employee Central Service Centre specific updates to Employee Central come together for the 1H 2022 SuccessFactors update.
Read More29 Jul 2022
I am fortunate enough to have a couple of Mac computers. An old Mac mini functions as an always on Mac carrying out tasks on demand and on a schedule, whereas my slightly newer Macbook Pro is the machine I use directly. But, I have Keyboard Maestro installed on both machines, and I needed to be able to determine which machine a macro was running on in some cases, as in some cases it should not run at all. This was particularly the case with scheduled macros. In this post I am going to share a couple of macros I am using for this.
Read More28 Jul 2022
Better Touch Tool now includes (beta) support for the Elgato Stream Deck, and I’ve been investigating how I can make good use of this functionality. During my experimentation, I came across something rather curious about trying to work with my notes app of choice, Obsidian. Menu automation appeared to be a stumbling block - at least at first.
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