Software History

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.

With the second release of 2018, SAP SuccessFactors is releasing a handful of notable updates for Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC). Data Protection and Privacy – some key info for everyone with interest in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Machine Learning – new functionality to automate some ticket related decisions. Ask HR Enhancements – some good news for global implementations and service agents. Responsive User Interface News – an update on the Fiori based user interface for Cloud for Customer.

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.

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.

Occasionally, I have a need to know the precise version of the OS of the Mac I’m using. This is particularly true when I get involved with beta testing software for developers. Whilst I can get the information manually each time, this was something that was ripe for automation. To that end I put together a shell script-based TextExpander snippet to output the information for me.

Drafts is an iOS app that’s been around for quite some time. In it’s fifth iteration it has become a veritable power house of an app with advanced automation features and a pro subscription option to match; though there’s also now a free tier too. For many, Drafts is a bit of a conundrum. Not fitting neatly into categorisation as a text editor, an automation tool, or anything else. It is quite distinct, yet overlaps many traditional app areas. But today I thought I’d give you some reasons as to why you should use Drafts.

Whereas many of the specific modules in this release are receiving low volumes, small updates, or a combination of the two, the underlying platform functionality for SuccessFactors is receiving a wide array of updates including many significant ones. Normally we’d go deep on just the key ones, but this time around, it’s going to be a wider whirlwind tour.

We’re over halfway through 2018 and in this release, we see SAP pull back a little and work on stability and tweaks rather than lots of new features. But while there’s no game-changing functionality in this Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) release, we do see some notable incremental changes and some important news for the future. Let’s dive straight in with a look at what’s new for employees in Ask HR.

The Q3 2018 release certainly brings one of the more unusual updates around reporting and analytics in SuccessFactors. To begin with, SAP is releasing a set of updates around the report tool, known as BIRT (Business Intelligent and Reporting Tool), and considered by most SuccessFactors users as a legacy reporting tool. Alongside this, they are also applying some updates to Report Centre and setting up some important changes for the Q4 2018 release. It is certainly quite unusual, so what’s going on?

It’s that time again. SAP have put another quarterly release of their HCM suite (SAP SuccessFactors) into preview environments. As always, my colleagues and I at Zalaris have been digging into the updates to figure out what’s important and what has the greatest potential. With GDPR now live, this quarter does not disappoint as it branches out in numerous ways, though you’ll still see some security and data related updates for some of the modules.

I occasionally get mentions on my favourite podcasts, and it was a lovely surprise to hear my name mentioned on Episode 7 of the relatively new Automators podcast.

With the move from Workflow to Shortcuts, I’ve come a little unstuck with a new issue around sharing them on iOS. Previously, if I wanted to get the name of a workflow and it’s URL in a Markdown link format, I could use a workflow to grab the title of the download page of the URL, which would match to the name of the workflow. After that it was just a case of wrapping the details in some Markdown syntax and we were done. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t work any more, but I have come up with a workaround utilising Scriptable.

As 2018 draws to a close, SAP is set to release a good range of feature updates to Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) users. While information on Ask HR is oddly scarce, there’s plenty of Cloud for Customer updates to keep everyone very happy.

We’re fast approaching the end of the year and so it’s time for SAP to roll-out the last of their SAP SuccessFactors HCM product suite quarterly updates for the period. In Preview systems at the moment it seems SAP have been pushing as hard as ever to get some great updates out to clients. As ever, my colleagues and I at Zalaris have been taking apart the information about the release and figuring out what’s actually important, and what has the greatest benefit potential for the customers. There’s certainly been a lot of new and interesting updates to pick through, so it’s a pretty jam packed review overall.

Shortcuts on iOS is a wonderfully versatile tool and I use it for a wide variety of things. Sometimes I even use it hands free as Shortcuts support Siri trigger words. Unfortunately, the shortcut’s subsequent interaction tends to be rather one way unless you are able to access your device’s keyboard. But it is just a tendency. Shortcuts can still interact with you on basic decision making operations and I use this in a number of shortcuts, including, most notably, a briefing routine that not only varies by time of day, but allows me to customise the content as it runs. In this post I’m going to show you the basic building blocks for how this works.

A few days ago over on the Automators podcast forum I answered a query about making use of the iOS app Launch Center Pro, which had recently been updated. The post was fairly extensive and received a lot of positive feedback. I therefore decided to paraphrase it here on my own web site as a reference for those who follow my writing. The posting came about in response to queries from a couple of users about use cases and a general utilisation of the app and so, in response, I decided to share some details about what it does for me. It focuses on the fact that Launch Center Pro offers me some specific features that I find useful, but for some of these features there are certainly alternative approaches. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as different approaches suit different workflows and different mind sets. Based on that I set out the following assertion for everything that follows. Launch Center Pro isn’t necessarily an app for everyone, but it can be an app for anyone, from novice through to advanced iOS user.

Did you know there’s a way to speed up Shortcuts shortcuts on iOS? It’s really simple and can make a huge impact. Particularly on more complex shortcuts.

The latest iteration of the iOS app Launch Center Pro comes with an option to use a Shortcuts shortcut to add launchers for shortcuts to Launch Center Pro. It allows you to grab a shortcut from Shortcuts, and to set the launcher icon and the launch URL in Launch Center Pro. Very meta, and very cool. However, I have a lot of shortcuts. I’m often at the four figure mark, and it just doesn’t give me the ease of set-up I need, and also I often like to run my shortcuts via a shortcut launcher to speed things up. To that end, I took it upon myself to produce an enhanced version of the original shortcut.

Last year I posted a small piece on text editing to the Automators forum. It was inspired by another post on the Drafts forum and focused on coming up with a way to edit text making more use of the screen estate than the paltry offering of the standard text options in Shortcuts. The premise was simply to enable a larger text editing area via Scriptable.

Early last month, a student teacher was posting on the Automators forum about using Drafts to make dealing with templates such as lesson plans easier. Through a bit of discussion in the thread, it came about that the student teacher really just was looking for a way to get simple text entry into a format compatible with the template - i.e. printable vs. editable. With this amendment I was able to put together an example based on the template they provided that would transform text in a draft via a Drafts action and Shortcuts into a nicely formatted PDF document. In this post I’m going to review the solution and approach as to how I did that.

Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) is the integrated HR ticketing solution for SuccessFactors. Based on several components, the solution leverages functionality from Employee Central (EC), SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C), SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) and other optional components. In reviewing this Q1 2019 release, I’m going to look specifically at the SCP and C4C updates that impact the use and implementation/maintenance of ECSC.

We’re now well into the second quarter of 2019, and that means that it’s almost time for the Q2 release of SAP SuccessFactors to be released to customers. The questions are, what’s in this latest release and what do customers need to know? That’s exactly the overarching question my colleagues and I at Zalaris tackle with our quarterly reviews. We compile the information SAP release, check the preview systems and then draw upon our own analytical skills and implementation & support experience to filter the wealth of information down to the key elements, presenting them in a format we hope is friendly and consumable by all.

I was working on a slide deck for work recently where I wanted to transition from one slide to another after a specified period of time. I was using PowerPoint and figured this would be no problem at all. I’d used this approach many times previously, but on this occasion it simply wouldn’t advance. The reason I eventually discovered was down to some on-slide animation.

In my day job I work with a lot of raw data, and I make judicious use of Microsoft Excel to help me in the builds and transforms I need to accomplish. As many people are no doubt aware, Excel can be quite useful with the use of tab separated text as it treats each tab as a way to separate data out into cells and each new line as a new row in a spreadsheet. At least that’s what I thought. Recently however, I fell foul of finding tab separated data on my Windows clipboard not pasting into Excel in this way. But I did track down why this occurred.

The quarter sees a wide range of updates across Cloud for Customer, Ask HR, and SuccessFactors Mobile, that will affect customers utilising Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC). It’s time for some significant changes to take place, so let’s dive in.

It’s already drawing to a close on the first quarter of the year and spring is upon us in the UK. That can only mean that the Q1 release of SuccessFactors is in preview environments and ready for imminent release. The question then is what does this mean for organisations who are using SuccessFactors? That’s what my colleagues and I strive to understand and share in our quarterly review of the SuccessFactors release. We sift through the information and draw upon our own experiences to pick out the key information and distil it down into a format that can be understood by everyone. Hopefully the insights we’ve provided over the last three and a half years help both clients and partners get more value from the releases and we’re always keen to hear feedback where about how the articles help people understand and get more from their investment.

If you are a Drafts user, you may be familiar with the concept of workspaces, but there’s also a (related) folder concept too that’s been around since much earlier versions of Drafts. In this post I’m going to explain a little about these folders and what they actually contain in regards to your Drafts.

I recently got a new Mac laptop, my previous one being the best part of a decade old, and I found myself copying new (non-app store) applications from the Downloads folder to the Applications folder far more often than I was comfortable with. To that end I decided to automate the process.

Shortcuts is a versatile automation tool on iOS, but it does have limitations. Many of these stem from it not being a true scripting/programming language, but rather a visual automation tool. When compared to alternatives like Pythonista or Scriptable, the app comes up a little short on things you might like to do with it sometimes that would be easier in other programming languages? But what if I told you that Shortcuts can actually tap into some of that coding power through a technique for evaluating JavaScript? Interested? Well let me explain.

SuccessFactors mobile holds a special place in our quarterly reviews as unlike other areas; it isn’t exactly matched to the quarterly release cycle. Instead, the iOS and Android mobile apps are released on a monthly cycle, and so we have a look back at recent updates and forward to pending and upcoming ones. This quarter though we have a mixture as some of the features are ones that happen behind the scenes and will be accessible to apps as soon as the core functionality is updated in the quarterly release. But before we begin looking at new and updated features, we need to look at some platform-related changes that SAP is introducing.