Check out the What’s New viewer for this release, and you’ll see that ~60% of them are Universal updates, meaning lots of improvements will be reaching lots of end-users automatically after the mid-November production release.
The HXM (Human Experience Management) message is still coming through very strongly in all of SAP’s marketing. In this release we see four further points of integration with Qualtrics to capture feedback and initiate surveys during business processes in Recruiting, Onboarding, Performance reviews and at the end of a Global Assignment as well as include Remote Work Pulse Surveys on the homepage.
After trialling with 50 beta customers, a redesigned “card-based” homepage is now available to all – but beware it still has some limitations (learn more in this SAP blog). The new homepage is just one of the many user experience updates we’ve come to expect in each release. As well as these web user experience features, I noted nearly 30 mobile updates across Platform, Employee Central, Learning, Onboarding, Performance & Goals and Recruiting; 10 specific to Android too (which has historically played catch up to iOS functionality updates).
Not content with just feature updates, SAP has released a brand new product called SAP Work Zone for HR. I understand that as a result of this, SAP Jam will be phased out later this year from the SAP price list. SAP Work Zone is a single-entry point for work – going beyond the traditional intranet capability that integrates content, information and collaboration capabilities. So far, I have not seen any pricing, but certainly, it is an interesting innovation from SAP.
Before escaping, I thought I would highlight a couple of module-specific newsletters that I subscribe to – if you are interested in EC or Recruiting & Onboarding then I recommend them:
Employee Central Intelligence by Brandon Toombs – subscribe here
Recruiting & Onboarding by Mark Ingram – subscribe here
Conclusion
With such a bumper update, there is plenty to dive into as you will see in our series of articles over the coming week; I hope you enjoy our updates. Each day you will see a blog post on our website linking to multiple articles; one post for each functional area. If you are a customer or have joined our mailing list (anyone can 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. It makes a handy searchable reference!
If you missed any of our previous blogs, you can always find them at zalaris.com.
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Stay safe!
Preview instances of SuccessFactors were updated on 16/17 October 2020, and the production instances are due to be updated on 20/21 November 2020.