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Overview of SAP SuccessFactors

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Organizations with a Viva Learning Premium license who use SAP SuccessFactors as their learning management system (LMS) can ingest course catalogs, assignments, learning paths, program, and permission defined at SuccessFactors into Viva Learning. This is achieved through a connector developed by Viva Learning in partnership with SAP SuccessFactors.

This article describes the workflow of this process and links to topics outlining each major step of the implementation.

Prerequisites

Admins need the following permissions:

  • Access to Viva Learning admin.
  • Access to Learning Administration in the SAP SuccessFactors portal.

Workflow

There are two major integration stages for which admins require specific permissions:

  1. Viva Learning Admin Interface:
    Getting access to Viva Learning Admin access

    Admins can manage their Viva Learning content from within the Viva Learning app in Teams. Refer to Manage content in the admin tab for more information.

  2. SAP SuccessFactors Learning:

    Admin should have Learning Administration Access in the SAP SuccessFactors portal. Learning administrators use the Learning Administration module to manage the Learning Management System (LMS), including learner profiles, learning content, and learning needs management.

Dataflow architecture

SAP SuccessFactors provides the content, learner records, programs, permissions for organizations. Viva Learning then extracts these records from the learning management system (LMS) through the LMS connector.

After the SuccessFactors integration is set up, SuccessFactors uploads the initial full Data Extract package onto the organization's SFTP server. The daily delta packages are later sent zipped. This contains data on catalog, assignment, program, and permission. The package is then consumed by the LMS Fetcher component of SuccessFactors connectors. The package is then stored, decrypted, processed, and finally stored in the tenant shard and Azure database.

These data packages generated by SuccessFactors can include the following:

  • Full data package: contains the full data dump of all the table files. This is denoted as <Customer Name>_F_YYYYMMDDHH24MISSzip.pgp.
  • Delta data package: contains only data files updated in last 24 hours. This is denoted as <Customer Name>_D_YYYYMMDDHH24MISSzip.pgp.

Learning object attributes

Learning Object attributes SuccessFactors TableName.FieldName Attribute type
Provider name SF (hardcoded) Required
Title PV_I18N_ACTIVE_LOCALE_LABEL. LABEL_VALUE Required
Description PV_I18N_ACTIVE_LOCALE_LABEL. LABEL_VALUE Required
Source name PA_CPNT_SRC.CPNT_SRC_DESC Required
Source name logo Not available Required
Thumbnail URL PA_CPNT. THUMBNAIL_URI Required
Deep link URL Not available (evaluated on the fly) Required
Last Modified Date PA_CPNT. LST_UPD_TSTMP Required
Format CPNT_TYPE Required
Language PV_I18N_ACTIVE_LOCALE_LABEL.LOCALE_ID Required
Duration PA_CPNT. CPNT_LEN Required
LearningItemId Given by internal system Required
Author PA_CPNT_EVTHST. INST_NAME Required
Length PA_CPNT. CPNT_LEN Required
Tags Optional
Difficulty level Optional
Thumbnail ALT Text Optional
Popularity score Optional
Skill Tag Optional

You can bring programs or learning paths from SAP SuccessFactors into Viva Learning. The programs are ingested along with the other content catalog items.

If you’re setting up SuccessFactors integration for your tenant for the first time, programs are automatically ingested along with other content.

If you’ve already integrated SuccessFactors and want to bring in programs, you need to request the SuccessFactors support team to regenerate the full sync package for your tenants. Viva Learning ingests the programs for your tenant once the package becomes available in your SuccessFactors folder path.

For thumbnail support, images hosted or uploaded in SuccessFactors as part of the "Image" property on items won't be available as part of the SuccessFactors data extract package and hence Viva Learning won't be able to display those images on content. The best practice to get images from SuccessFactors is to provide a publicly accessible URL in "Image URL:" property for content in SuccessFactors, so that users are able to view these images in Viva Learning.