Welcome to our last ever set of articles about SuccessFactors Quarterly Releases … not because we have plans to stop reviewing the product updates but because SAP have announced, that from 2020, they will move to biannual updates. As SAP explain in this Community post, it “won’t slow the amount of innovation you’ve come to expect, rather it will provide your company with more time to understand, test and adopt opt-in features”. For regular readers, you may recall me discussing a similar point in my Q1 2019 introduction post back in March about how often customers might choose to adopt optional updates (i.e. not every quarter!).
Anyway, onto the Q4 release which we’ll be covering with our usual series of articles over the coming week. Another year has flown by and the subject of Christmas is starting to be talked about (is it now ok to mention Christmas, now Halloween has passed?); what gifts has SAP given us this time around …
In the Q4 release, there is the larger than usual number of updates in Compensation and general HCM Suite changes. Employee Central, Platform and Recruiting continue to receive the largest number of changes. Check out the articles on areas that are of interest to you for more details.
Adopting change is a problem that customers have faced; SAP have now responded to this with the move to biannual updates (in May/November) from 2020. In Q4, much like Q3, the number of updates requiring your input, in order to adopt them, is relatively small (~30%) so lots of changes will be immediately available to you once the release is live from 7th December.
Two solutions within the suite have big changes ahead. Firstly, Onboarding 2.0 goes on GA (General Availability) this month (see this SAP employee blog) albeit noting that there are still some functional gaps (to ONB 1.0) that will be closed during 2020. Secondly, a big upcoming area of change is the move away from Flash (to HTML) in Learning administration. Apart from tackling the end of Flash, it will provide a more integrated (to the SuccessFactors platform) set of tools and an improved user experience.
Thanks to all of you who have been reading, sharing and providing feedback on our content. If you missed our previous quarter’s blogs, you can find them on zalaris.co.uk. As before, you’ll see a set of blog posts on our website linking to multiple articles; one for each functional area. If you are a customer or have joined our mailing list (sign up via the link on this page), then you’ll receive a consolidated eBook of all the articles shortly after the end of our series.
These highlights, and many more, will be covered in our series of articles; I hope you enjoy our updates. As always feedback is welcomed via email or Twitter.
Stephen Burr
