Navigating in the SAP SuccessFactors Platform

Employees with any administrative privileges have the Admin Center option in the Home navigation menu as well as the Name menu.

The Administration Center page shows links only to the administrative features for which the administrator has permission. Remember, you can only access pages which you have permission to access.

Admin Center is the central access point to a wide range of administrative features and tools that can be used to configure and maintain the SAP SuccessFactors application. Admin Center can be used to monitor overall system health and manage cross-suite or third-party integrations.

The Admin Center provides customers easy access to any part of their SAP SuccessFactors system.

Admin Center is a universal feature of SAP SuccessFactors that had two versions available until the 1H 2022 release. At that time the older version known as OneAdmin was retired and the newer version, NextGen Admin, was rebranded as simply Admin Center. The latest version is based on SAP Fiori design and includes additional functionality that was not available in the older version. Additionally, although SAP will update product documentation with every release, Knowledge Base Articles or KBAs may take a while to be updated especially for changes that impact several KBAs. Consultants should consider this when searching for answers using KBAs.  For large changes like this, it is important that consultants access the relevant guides on the SAP Help Portal as well as announcements in the SAP Customer Community.

• Using Admin Center
• Deprecation of OneAdmin (Admin 2.0) and Transition to NextGen Admin – First Half 2022 Release: Innovation Alert

Admin Center, known as Next Gen Admin prior to the 1H 2022 release, is now the only available version available.

• Admin Homepage

• Admin Tools

• Tool Search

• Admin Favorites

• Upgrade Center

• Execution Manager

• Performance Metrics

• Integration Center

• Event Center

Anyone who has been granted administrative permission can access the Admin Center. That is, anyone who has permission to access at least one admin tool or admin setting can also access the Admin Center page. There is no separate permission that controls access to the Admin Center page itself.

To search for an admin tool, use the Tool Search box. When you begin to type the name of the feature, the system automatically attempts to complete what is typed. For example, when searching for the feature Manage Recruiting Groups, the system produces a list of possible outcomes, with a description of the highlighted feature. Although the results when using this tool will be similar to the results when using Action Search, the results of a Tool Search will be more narrowly focused on results from Admin Center.

You can add tools as Favorites and see recently used tools in the Admin Center. You can also select a tools category from the search results to see corresponding links, instead of scrolling through the lists of links within the nested categories.

This gives Admins the ability to add more of their frequently used tools to their Favorites list, as well as see all of the search results for a particular tool without having them separated across the page.

At the top of the page, a search bar allows users to search for an action or for people.

People Search in the Global Header enables you to search for and find people in your organization.

The benefits of the Global Header People Search include the following.

• Easy access from every page.

• Supports for fuzzy matching, allowing you to find an employee by a search term that has one character difference from the target employee name.

• Supports searching for employee names that contain characters with accents, umlauts, diereses, and so on.

• Supports searching for employees by Employee Central names.

• Ability to control the EC (Employee Central) and non-EC user info displayed in the search results with Role-Based Permissions.

If you want to search for employees and are not sure about the exact spelling of their names, you can use the special character "*" as a wildcard.

To help you better understand the matching logic, let's assume that Person A "Mike Adams" and Person B "Mike Williams" are in our employee database.

So when you search for "Mike adam", Person A appears in your search results. When you search for "Mike Willi", Person B appears in your search results. When you search for "Mi *ams", both Person A and Person B appear in your search results. When you search for "*ike Adams", neither Person A nor Person B appears in your search results

For further information check: Allowing Special Characters in Search Queries

Fuzzy search allows you to find an employee by a search term that has one character difference from the target employee name. The new feature applies to the following scenarios when searching employees:

• One missing or redundant character. If you search for "Joerg", the results also return "Jörg", and vice versa.

• One misspelled character. If you search for "ALLEX", the search results also return "Alex" and "Allen", and vice versa.

Prerequisites:

• User Search permission is granted in RBP.

• Enable Solr People Search is enabled in Provisioning.

To enable the fuzzy search:

1. From the Action Search, go to Company System and Logo Settings.

2. Turn on Enable fuzzy search function for People Search.

3. Choose Save Company System Setting to save changes.

Note

In the 2H 2019 Release (also called the 1911 release) a change was made to the Company System and Logo Settings page and the Company Logo field was made a required field. For this reason if the URL of the Company Logo field is blank and you attempt to save changes you will get an error. To fix this you can follow the steps in the following Knowledge Base Article (KBA): 2888435 - Cannot save changes on Company System and Logo Settings due to the error "Specify a company logo URL"

By default, inactive users are not included in People Search results. Use this configuration option to include them.

1. From the Action Search go to Company System and Logo Settings.

2. Select the option Show inactive user in people search (requires Role-based Permissions).

3. Choose Save Company System Setting to save the change.

This company-level setting does not affect search functions on People Profile or Employee Directory. Likewise, feature settings and permissions used to control search functions on People Profile or Employee Directory, such as the Role-Based Permission Include Inactive Employees in the search, do not affect People Search.

Future hires are also displayed as inactive users in the People Search results in the Global Header.

Note

People Search uses the company-level Show inactive user in people search (requires Role-based Permissions) setting only and not Role-Based Permissions. You cannot restrict the visibility of inactive users in People Search based on permission role.

Action Search is a feature designed to facilitate navigation and enhance overall system usability.

As an End User, you can use Action Search to find dozens of common actions directly in the search bar at the top of the page. You can use natural language to describe what you want to do, and then select from a list of suggested actions.

As an administrator, you can use Action Search to access your Admin Center as well. You can also do the following:

• Create a search for relevant actions based on keywords and synonyms.

• Manage and configure your own action keywords and custom links.

As an administrator, you can access Admin Center → Company Settings → Manage Action Search to customize the ways in which users find actions from the search bar in the page header. You can enable or disable actions, and add your own search terms or search labels, both for standard actions and your own custom actions.

There are a number of predefined actions and paraphrases within SAP SuccessFactors. If you would like for users to have additional key words or paraphrases to search by, you can add your own Custom Paraphrase within a specific Action.

For example, as an administrator, you may refer to Role-Based Permissions as RBPs. In Action Search, you can add RBP as a searchable paraphrase from Action Search. To do this, choose Action from the list on the left side of the page. Then choose the Add custom paraphrases option. Type in the new paraphrase under When the user searches for any of these… and the option you’d like to display in the search results under Display this paraphrase. Then click Save.

Note

You can find out more about People Search andAction Search by reviewing the documentation on the SAP Help Portal

Quick cards display basic information about employees in the system such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, titles, and locations.

Quick cards are available in several places within the application, and you can display them as follows:

• By hovering over an employee’s name, like in People Search;
• By selecting on an employee’s name, like in performance forms; or
• By choosing on the small Rolodex-card icons shown next to each employee’s name in certain areas of the tool like Calibration sessions.

Quick cards are a convenient way to find information about employees in a single place including contact information and team size. With the take action option available on quick cards, users can navigate to other areas in the system that contain additional employee information.

There are some specificities to keep in mind when using quick cards:

• Content in quick cards is dynamic and most content is not customizable.
• You will not see links to content that you do not have permission to see, so all security permissions are respected in quick cards.
• Some links can be enabled or disabled.

On the right-hand side, you can see the differences in Barry’s quick card when it is accessed by two different users. The first is an administrator with full permissions and the second is a different administrator with fewer permissions. Therefore, fewer links are available.