Latest Home Page Experience in the 2H 2021 SF Release

The end of the year traditionally makes way for the final SAP SuccessFactors release. Let’s find out below what this means for the Latest Home Page Experience!

The idea behind the Latest Home Page is to offer you a simpler and more engaging landing page. SAP wants to help you complete your actions more quickly, to inform you of recent changes within the organisation that request your approval, what tasks you need to perform or recent updates that are relevant to you. They also want to offer you a more consistent experience across all your devices. What you see on your mobile app is in line with what you see on your desktop.

As you’re probably all aware, the Latest Home Page has not been universally pushed with this release. For now it’s an admin opt-in, so you can choose whether you want to activate it or not. And in combination with the role-based permissions framework you’re able to activate it only for a select group of employees that functions as a small pilot group. So switching it on does not mean that everyone sees it immediately.

Let’s take a look at the different sections that build up the Latest Home Page Experience!

WELCOME BANNER

Here it’s possible to upload some nice imagery from your organisation that is accompanied with a welcome message like good morning, good afternoon or good evening. What a user sees is based on the time zone that is assigned to that user. If you want, you’re able to hide the image, but you will still see the welcome message.

QUICK ACTIONS

These are the most frequent and important actions that an employee needs to perform. For example they allow you to request time off, go to the org chart, record time, etc. The great thing with these Quick Actions is that they’re mostly pop-over windows. When you click on one, there opens a small window above or on top of your Home Page where you can perform the necessary action and land back on the Home Page like you were before. This way you don’t need to navigate to other pages and wait for them to load and then switch back to the Home Page. This offers a much smoother experience. The idea behind these Quick Actions is that it’s designed to promote efficient and focused action for your most common use cases.

Considering the availability of the Quick Actions, you see the Quick Actions of the functionalities for which you possess the permission to perform. If you don’t possess the permission to request feedback, than you won’t see the related Quick Action to do so, that’s what we mean with permission based. As an administrator you’re able to hide certain Quick Actions. You can change which Quick Actions are available for users that have the permissions. You can eliminate those, but note that this is a company wide decision. Everyone that had the Quick Action will no longer have it, you’re not able to work with granted groups here, where some would keep the Quick Action and others not. But it’s still separate from permissions, if you have the permission and the Quick Action is eliminated you can still perform the action.

There’s a maximum of 16 actions. If you have permission to see more, the system will define for you the most relevant ones, what are the most common use cases.

The Quick Action ‘Favorites’ allows each user to go over the list of functionalities and mark their favorite ones. This way they can navigate to them more quickly in the feature. But let it be clear that this is done on an individual level.

APPROVALS

These are to-do’s concerning changes in the system that are awaiting your approval. You need to review them and approve or decline them and possibly write some comments. With this release it’s now possible for you to directly accept or decline them right there on the Home Page. After accepting or declining them they will disappear from your Home Page.

Small disclaimer from SAP is that not all approvals will be shown here, however the most important ones will. You will have your job offers, job requisitions, absences, time sheets, MDF workflows, address changes, etc. Those will all be visible here. There’s a rare few of approvals that won’t be shown here but these you can find in the To Do List Side Panel to where you can navigate to in the top right corner when you click on the check mark, there you will see all approvals, including those that are not visible in the ‘Approvals’ section on the Latest Home Page.

FOR YOU TODAY

Here you can find other tasks that need to be performed by the employee that don’t concern approvals. This is dynamically generated content, which means that the system automatically creates this information and shows it to a an employee. The idea is that these are engagement cards, and the system wants to direct the attention of the employee to tasks they need to perform.

As an administrator you don’t need to generate content but you also can’t configure content for this. As the tasks of the employees will be different, there ‘For You Today’ sections will also vary.

ORGANIZATIONAL UPDATES

Organizational Updates is the place where you can post custom content that is created by and managed by administrators from your organization. One example would be to link a new card with the URL of you company intranet.

There’s also the possibility to import your custom tiles from the Legacy Home Page. These then turn into new cards in Organisational Updates. However there is certainly a noteworthy transformation. The icons we all know from the custom tiles are no longer available, you now have to upload an image that is shown on these cards.

As previously mentioned, the goal of the Latest Home Page is to offer you a much simpler view on the most important matters that you need to attend. Within that mindset SAP wants to avoid clutter. That’s why they made the decision to only show up to 12 custom cards to an employee on their Home Page. With this release it’s now possible for administrator to manage the order in which these custom cards appear. In the backend administrators can manage up to a 100 custom cards. These can be made visible to certain granted groups, for example all employees of one certain legal entity. You can also work with specified timeframes where the custom cards will be visible, for example Christmas greetings.

SURVEYS & TIMELINE

If you have a Qualtrics license and you’ve set up the integration, it’s possible to make surveys visible on your Home Page.

With the next release, in spring of 2022, this Latest Home Page Experience will be universally pushed.

OUR ANALYSIS ON THE LATEST HOME PAGE EXPERIENCE

We’ve performed a critical analysis of the Latest Home Page, there’s much we like but there’s also some important remarks our customers should be aware of!

• Reports
  With the Legacy Home Page it’s possible to show report tiles. With the current version of the Latest Home Page this is not a possibility. We’re hoping that in the future it will be possible to show People Analytics content on the Home Page but as of now this is not an option. To deal with this there’s the Quick Action that leads you to the Report Centre where you can execute this reports.
• Granted groups for custom cards
  With the Legacy Home Page you could assign permission groups to custom sections to manage the visibility of custom tiles. It’s no longer possible to create custom sections, you’re only able to create custom cards in the Organizational Updates section. You can assign granted groups to these custom cards, however these aren’t permission groups. These are groups that are defined by Employee Profile fields, so they don’t offer the same diversification as permission groups do, because these use Employee Central fields.
• Permission to access Latest Home Page Experience
  If you don’t have this permission you won’t see the Latest Home Page, even if the upgrade has been performed. This allows you to adopt the Latest Home Page in a gradual way by rolling it out one group at a time. Important to note here is that each employee only has access to one version of the Home Page at time. There’s no way to toggle between the Legacy and the Latest Home Page.
• Instance copy
  Previously you had to request the assistance from SAP when you had enabled the Latest Home Page and wanted to perform an instance copy, fortunately this is no longer necessary. You can just work with the instance refresh self service tool.
  If you’re planning on the one hand to experiment with the Latest Home Page but on the other hand planning an instance copy, our recommendation would be to schedule the copy first so that you don’t lose your effort considering the Latest Home Page.
• Different types of content for a custom card
  Most content behind a custom card for Organizational Updates will just be a URL. However there are more technical options like Javascript files or embedded videos from private or public domains.
• Not much content initially
  When you first perform the upgrade it’s certainly possible that you won’t see much content. You’ll see the Quick Actions and that will probably be all. SAP is aware of this and communicates this also. If you have approvals assigned to you, these will become available as soon as you perform the upgrade for the enhanced to do integration. The For You Today section takes a little bit of time to get dynamically generated by the system. And the Organizational Updates need to be managed by the system administrators. So don’t be shocked if you initially only see Quick Actions.
• Not possible to reorder the sections
  It’s currently not supported to change the order that the sections are in, so for example it’s not possible to show the Organizational Updates on top of the page. With the Legacy Home Page you could adapt the order of the sections. SAP does say that Product Management will investigate this possibility in the future.
• Multiple employments
  With the Latest Home Page you’re able to switch between your employments and look at the Home Page from each employment.

PERFORMING THE UPGRADE TO THE LATEST HOME PAGE EXPERIENCE

We’ve written down the necessary steps you need to undertake to perform the switch to the Latest Home Page Experience.

1. Run check tool to validate the to-do categories
2. Upgrade to the Latest Home Page
3. Upgrade to the enhanced To Do integration
4. Start by giving permissions to a small group of people
5. Import custom tiles
6. Import custom links
7. Customize the Latest Home Page

Please note that only the To Dos that have been created in the last 90 days will be available in the Approvals section. But if you would however have an approval To Do that’s created a 100 days ago you’ll be able to find it in the To Do List Side Panel.

As delaware our advice would be to go ahead and start experimenting with this Latest Home Page. You want to be prepared for the universal push as now you’re still able to change the view for a limited pilot group. This pilot group can have a look around, see what they like and what they don’t like and large issues can be escalated.

Of course it’s to be recommended to first perform this upgrade on a test environment. The fact that the Latest Home Page is limited via role based permissions does allow you to also activate it on your Production environment without causing a big fuzz for all your employees.

We want to stress that it’s understandable if this feels like a lot. If you find this a little too much to capture, know that we are happy to help! So please reach out to us and we can look together at how we can support you with this.

IN CONCLUSION

Whether changes and updates with each release are either big or small, we truly believe that these will keep on improving your user experience with the SF platform step by step.

If you would like to see our take on the latest Home Page Experience, feel free to re-watch our 2021 2H Fall Release Webinar.