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.
Read More20 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.
Read More24 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.
Read More04 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.
Read More20 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.
Read More04 Jan 2018
2017 has passed into history and so I’m taking my annual look back at what’s been getting the page hits on thoughtasylum.com and a personal look at the past year.
Read More22 Dec 2017
Something I find I need to do quite regularly is take a snap shot of a folder. For the purposes of saving space (and often for passing on the folder to someone else) I like to compress the folder into a ZIP archive and prefix the current time stamp to the file name.
This little activity was perfect for a bit of automation and so I created a little script in XYplorer (my Windows file manager of choice) to make this as easy as clicking a button.
Read More30 Nov 2017
Recently I was using an Excel spreadsheet to prepare some data and I had a constraint to work to in the number of lines of data the target system could display. Unfortunately rather than rows of data in Excel this was to match against rows of data in a single Excel cell. So the question is, how can you count the number of rows in an Excel cell?
Read More10 Oct 2017
I’ve been on Twitter a while now, but since starting in my current business role I’ve had a separate account for my work posts. I’ve been posting non-work things to @sylumer and work items to @SAP_Stephen. However last month I changed my work Twitter account and in this post I’m going to talk a little about the reason and approach.
Read More