Creating Cloud Extensions for SuccessFactors – Part 1: Why should we do it?

[Former Member]

With the shift from On-Premise to Cloud technology, which has been happening over the past years. Cloud vendors mantra has been to run standard – with no possibilities of changing what they consider standard. This typically results in us throwing our good ideas back at them, and if we are lucky, having them implemented when they see fit to put it into a release.

In todays world, running IT System as an absolute standard out-of-the-box systems, and without the ability to change as much as a comma, means you can’t properly adapt to ever changing Business Requirements. Some of this can be achieved with the configuration options, however in looking to adapt an IT system to your business, you really need to be able to extend it somehow.

About a year ago, acknowledging this, SAP enabled the possibility of extending their Cloud based HR platform, SuccessFactors – with apps created with HANA Cloud Platform (HCP).

Now with HCP, developers can consume and display HR Data from SuccessFactors OData API’s (or 3^rd party systems), through custom created screens, simplifying data input/output, or mash processes as we’ve always been able to do with SAP On-Premise.

In effect, SAP has combined the best of 2 worlds now:

1) Running a managed Cloud HR-Solution, which will be maintained by the software vendor

2) Being able to adapt it for your business needs.

With the following blog posts, I will go over the steps to set it up, and then proceed to create a simple app for plugging into SuccessFactors. So take the journey with me.

If you liked reading this post, you might consider following me to read about Creating Cloud Extensions Part 2 : Connecting to HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) from Success Factors (SFS).