Best practice forum (Archived)

Workday HRIS Integration

By request of a potential TotaraLMS subscriber, I am wondering if anyone has performed a successful integration of Workday HRIS with Totara. I realize this is a very specific use case but on chance of a long shot maybe somebody has done this integration. If you have experience with Workday and Totara I would love to hear from you.

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No problem Amir.

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We moved forward with the Workday integration by using Totara Sync in a proof of concept phase. The client is not satisfied with this in a final rollout, and hence my company is in the process of developing web services around Totara Hierarchy features, including assigning users to managers/positions/organizations as well as managing hierarchies themselves including organizations and positions. So at this point I can say that a Workday to Totara integration is partially successful, in that we have achieved a proof of concept that it is indeed possible via Totara Sync, just not ideal in the client's eyes.

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Hi Jamie,

Are you able to provide any more details on why the client wasn't happy with Totara sync? Is it related to the error handling issues (we are working on them now), or something else?

Simon

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Hi Simon,

I would be happy to provide additional details. In essence, I have worked with several clients who express displeasure with the idea of the CSV import process. These types of clients have pretty mature development resources and expect nothing less than fully capable web-services enabled applications. I've even experienced a snicker when mentioning CSV import :) . In essence these clients consider web services to be more robust for integration with existing applications. They develop fully transactional integrations with web services, which can handle errors and such so that a failed update to a user account for instance will queue up and another attempt will be made later. At this point we are investing in developer resources to at least enable the assignment of users to managers, positions, and organizations via web services. This seems to be a natural first step, since these assignments are "sort of" like user attributes. I have been hoping that other community members might chime in and help me express this need but I haven't seen that yet (everyone, chime in now). I have another thread open on the partners forum area asking about extending the existing Moodle web services to cover more of the Totara features and it is not on the forseeable road map from what I gather. I was given the impression that such an addition would be welcome to Totara though.

I hope this helps and would be glad to offer additional explanation as needed. Thanks for checking in Simon.

Jamie

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Hi Jamie,

Thanks that's useful to know. Have you looked at the "external database" option totara sync? It works the same as the CSV import but gets the data from another database instead of a file.

Actually there are now some plans to expand the Totara-specific web services in order to allow us to extend the Moodle Mobile app to support more Totara features, so do stay in touch about your plans in that area. Apologies for the lack of reply on the other thread, I will update it now.

Simon

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I will definitly revisit the external database functionality of Totara Sync and reconsider how I offer this solution to the type of clients I am talking about. You definitely got me wheels turning as I rethink how a database could be the "middle man" between the two systems. Thanks again Simon. I will check out the other thread as well.

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Cool, in some cases (depending on the system architecture) you might even be able to connect directly to their HR system's database. External database supports Mysql, Postgres and MSSQL and using field remapping you can map the column names to the correct fields in Totara. The only issue is if the underlying schema doesn't perfectly match what we require, at which point another step might be needed to reshape the data.

Good luck,

Simon

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Simon, is there any documentation on how the external database connection works? Or how we set it up? I also have a client interested in it, but without fully understanding how it works or how to set it up, I'm reluctant to offer it as a solution. From what we can tell, you still need to initiate the process, that it's not really like a web service. Any detail other than what's in the help site would be useful.

Thank you!

Susan

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Hi Susan,

Sorry, I missed your post back in August when you wrote it.

Can you clarify exactly what information you need to know?

The sync should run every time that totara sync runs on the cron (which in 2.5 you will be able to schedule via the interface). It can also be manually run via the interface.

Simon

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