Exposing a Story-Related Live Connection to the SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise Edition

[TarkanCitirgi]

As part of the SuccessFactors People Analytics portfolio, an SAP Analytics Cloud based reporting solution called Stories was released in H1 2020.

All SuccessFactors customers can enable Stories at no additional cost. In order to do this, customers need to enable SSO and upgrade to the new Report Center solution.  Customers can accomplish both of these upgrades in the SuccessFactors Upgrade Center.

Stories is part of the SuccessFactors suite and works only within SuccessFactors. Many SuccessFactors customers also use the Enterprise edition of SAP Analytics Cloud to enable BI, Planning and Predictive capabilities as well as cross-LoB analytics (e.g. SAP Analytics Cloud Story with SuccessFactors and S/4 data).  Today it is not possible to expose the live connection (which is used in People Analytics Stories) to the Enterprise edition of SAP Analytics Cloud to enable the same type of reports to be created in the Enterprise edition. SuccessFactors and SAP Analytics Cloud are working in the final phase to enable this in the early to mid-2023 timeframe.

SF connection options in SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise edition

 

Early Adopter Care Program to be Announced to Help Customers Leverage the Story Connection to the SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise Edition

We plan to announce an Early Adopter Care program in 2023 to assist customers to enable this new feature. Customers will be able to sign up for this program if they (a) have enabled Stories in People Analytics and (b) have SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise edition in use.

SuccessFactors is already in touch with customers who have shown an interest to participate in the EAC program. As part of the program, we provide access to the Early Adoption version of this feature.

This new feature will make available a copy connection workflow to expose Story-related connection details to the SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise edition. Once the live connection has been successfully enabled in the Enterprise edition of SAP Analytics Cloud, customers will see the following:

• The SuccessFactors specific Query Designer becomes available in the Enterprise Edition.


• Via the Query Designer, all Story-related reporting content is exposed to the Enterprise edition to create data sources.


• All SuccessFactors functionalities such as permission and read access logging are leveraged.

Limitations of the Early Adoption Version

The Early Adoption version will have limitations, of which these are some examples:

1. Concurrent Employment is not supported; in case of Concurrent Employment, the employee's main employment will be used by default.


2. The IAS tenant as part of the SuccessFactors SSO enablement must be same that is used by the SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise edition.


3. The locale of the SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise edition is not used for SuccessFactors content; instead, English as a default locale of the SuccessFactors user is taken into account.


4. The SuccessFactors-specific instance refresh does not account for any additional live connections. To ensure that no additional live connections are broken during early adoption period, an instance refresh may not be conducted in this environment.

We plan to remove most of these limitations prior to releasing the Generally Available (GA) version of this feature.

We will continue to update this blog post as we get closer to the availability of this feature in the Early Adoption phase.  Interested customers who meet the above prerequisites for thsi program can still get in touch via the following email address: PeopleAnalytics@sap.com.

Be sure to bookmark this and review it periodically for updates.

[Henry_Banks]

Thanks for this information tarkan.citirgi this is fantastic news and a long time coming. The influence entry asking for this is/was a popular item https://influence.sap.com/sap/ino/#/idea/142830 so thanks for listening.

To be fair, SuccessFactors has been leading the charge for 'SAC embedded analytics' alongside S/4HANA; and hopefully to followed by general availability for Ariba, CX then Concur solutions before too long.

Hopefully this new Live connection in SAC will be able to query the SFSF Learning system, not only Employee central?  Looking forward to finding out more in due course.

Regards

Henry

[sweiss]

I have a few questions about this upcoming feature with regards to the following point:

• Via the Query Designer, all Story-related reporting content is exposed to the Enterprise edition.

Would this also mean that pre-delivered story templates from SF can be reused in SAC? Also, is it possible to move custom stories from SF to SAC to reuse them there and adding the advantages of SAC?

Thank you!

[suleirmak]

Hello Tarkan,

Thanks for the information. I would like to learn if there are any updates with this.

Thanks

[TarkanCitirgi]

I apologize for the late response. After a delay, we are planning to conduct the EAC program this year (program start at the latest mid of this year). Thank you.

[TarkanCitirgi]

Unfortunately, in the first version it won't be possible to import Story templates from ACN into SAC Enterprise, but it is in our roadmap. However, SAC is developing another feature to import in a so-called online mode Stories from another SAC tenant (including SAC Embedded). Unfortunately, this won't be possible in the EAC version either. Thank you.

[TarkanCitirgi]

In the short term we are still looking for customers who are interested in participating in the EAC program. The EAC program will start in March 2023.

As mentioned in the article, some technical requirements must be met such as the successful Story reporting enablement, the availability of a SAC Enterprise tenant and that both use the same IAS service for authentication. Details can be checked by us.

If you are interested, please contact us via the following email address: PeopleAnalytics@sap.com.

[torsten_wirth]

What's is the status of the exposed live connection for Enterprise edition? Is EAC still running or is this GA already?

[Maheshwar_Singh]

Currently, in SAC standalone we support embedded model for stories similar to embedded SAC.

We are working on making this connection support a public model similar to other enterprise connections. This will be available in H1'24.

the recommendation is to wait for the H1'24 release.

[TarkanCitirgi]

Exposing the (SuccessFactors) Embedded Story to SAC Enterprise Cloud Enterprise edition is live since the SuccessFactors H2 2023 release and is documented in the following What's New information:
Availability of Live Connection from SAP SuccessFactors to SAP Analytics Cloud