4 Reasons to Integrate SumTotal with Salesforce

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Integrating Salesforce with SumTotal(sumtotal salesforce integration) has never been easier. Both companies are making their platforms easy to integrate with other enterprise applications, and it is now possible to connect them with a few clicks in a simple interface. The expensive, time-consuming technical integrations of the past are no longer necessary.

SumTotal’s partnership with SnapLogic has made integrations stronger than ever. SnapLogic’s support of Webhooks enables your integration to send small, lightweight updates immediately when events happen in SumTotal instead of the usual large, resource-consuming daily or weekly file transfers. You will have real-time learning updates, reporting, and analytics.

LMS integration puts learning opportunities, tracking and learning achievements in a Salesforce learning tab alongside your users’ everyday activities. It removes barriers to learning and sales excellence with a seamless user experience. Your users have access to information they need when they need it.

The combined power of Salesforce and SumTotal can have a significant impact on your organization by empowering people to take charge of meeting their needs. We have listed here four ways that will help your company succeed.

Improve Sales Performance

Once you complete the integration, sales training, and product training opportunities will live in Salesforce learning tab. By providing just-in-time micro-learning in Salesforce, you will give your sales staff the opportunity to develop their skills and knowledge while the need is fresh in their minds.

Your sales team will have their learning progress, achievements, and opportunities inside the application when they accomplish their daily tasks. It removes learning as a separate activity and makes it a seamless part of the sales experience.

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Streamline Administration

Insights into course progress and completion for their users give your administrators the ability to assess learning needs and respond to them immediately. Your administrators will appreciate real-time data and capacity to run training reports from Salesforce. They will know what is working and what isn’t, and will bring that information to the people who design the learning experience.

Make Better Decisions

Real-time analytics will give your business leaders the intelligence they need to make better-informed decisions. They can correlate learning data with sales performance and better target areas of need. It will enable them to see the impact of training on revenue in real time.

Improve Customer Loyalty and Retention

Providing learning to customers can increase customer loyalty, boost sales, and grow your brand. Consumers and business buyers now expect instant information on how to use a product, and will quickly switch providers if they don’t have a positive experience.

One of the best examples of customer learning strategy is the Orvis learning center. The company is a provider of outdoor gear, clothing, and fly fishing and hunting equipment. The learning center contains a library of tutorials and videos on every product topic, from how to care for a dress shirt to how to keep your senior dog healthy. It has the most extensive learning library on fly fishing in the world. Orvis does not compete on price. It competes on quality and learning.

Another example is the extensive do-it-yourself learning libraries in the major home improvement stores. Each project has a list of tools and materials, driving both online and store sales.

Manuals for technology products are a thing of the past. Companies now provide online installation guides and tutorials.

We can’t think of a business that can’t benefit from some time of customer learning.

We are sure you will find many benefits beyond the four we have mentioned here. Integrating Salesforce and SumTotal is easy to do, and it can have a powerful effect on your organization. Let the power of integration drive your business to better results.

Integrate your Workday® HCM with SumTotal LMS

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Workday® is the employee system of record for many enterprises. These companies also have human capital management platforms from other vendors to handle the unique needs of their businesses.

To enable these platforms to work together, Workday® provides a variety of tools designed to manage the flow of data between them. These include open, standards-based web services, the Workday® Integration Cloud Platform, Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB), and Workday® Studio, a sophisticated tool for skilled developers

Workday® Integration Cloud provides pre-built connections with other enterprise applications. Workday® provides and manages the connectors. However, there is no default connector available for SumTotal, so most customers end up doing custom integrations.

Workday® eases the pain for ElixHR customers with pre-built integration for Workday®, but for customer who have SumTotal Learn or Perform without the ElixHR integration add-on, the need for a custom solution remains.

The solution is to use EIB to send data from Workday® to SumTotal, and a custom Workday® Studio integration to bring training data back into Workday®.

For the EIB integration, create a custom report in Workday® with the following data:

  • employee personal information,
  • location,
  • manager relationship,
  • organization,
  • job data, and
  • skills and competencies.

Create transformation steps in EIB to format the data to SumTotal DSU specifications and generate a flat file for processing into SumTotal Learn using the nightly process.

For the data transfer from SumTotal to Workday®, build a custom Studio integration in Workday® to receive SumTotal roster management web services to pull activity completions. This will allow you to retain training information in Workday® for reporting, employee development, and succession planning.

Be sure to schedule the activities for the overnight data feed so records are up to date. Since Workday® is the system of record, we recommend transferring the EIB file to SumTotal before processing the SumTotal file for Workday®.

We hope this helps you manage your integrations so you can achieve the full performance value of both platforms.

Challenges in SumTotal SkillSoft Integration

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SkillSoft is the leading provider of off-the-shelf learning content, and SumTotal is a popular vendor of learning management systems. Together, they use an Open Learning Services Architecture (OLSA) integration to standardize and simplify how SumTotal organizes SkillSoft learning content. OLSA handles the administrative tasks required to align activity types, create the library hierarchy, and organize prefixing and suffixing activity names and codes.

Complex business requirements and large content libraries can make organizing content libraries difficult. The purpose of the integration standard is to manage the unique complexity of each set of business needs without requiring customization of your LMS.

Technical Requirements

Using the SkillSoft OLSA requires working knowledge of web services, AICC, SOAP, HTTP, and HTTPS. SkillSoft provides a complete OLSA integration guide to clients.

There are some specific use cases you need to be aware of when you are working with the SumTotal-SkillSoft integration. If these use cases apply to your organization, you will need to build the solutions into your project plan.

Special Use Cases in SkillSoft-SumTotal Integration

  • Decentralized Global Organization. A decentralized organization’s separate business units will often have different contracts and licensing models or use different SkillSoft sites. Organizing libraries and audiences can be a challenge because there is no custom segmentation in SkillSoft. If you want the SkillSoft activities to be targeted based on the user’s organization, you will need to configure the integration to segment the libraries for your users.
  • Merging SkillSoft Content into the Library. Most organizations have several content providers and produce at least some content in-house. Organizing SkillSoft content with these various libraries can be a challenge. The OLSA integration has a catalog hierarchy tool that enables you to define a custom hierarchy to give learners and administrators a transparent and seamless experience.
  • Removing Retired Content: As SkillSoft updates its content, it introduces new content and retires obsolete activities. Your integration will need to determine if learners are using retired activities and whether there is a replacement, then notify your administrators so they can take action. Here are the steps required to handle retired content.
  1.  A nightly job pulls the content and library information for SkillSoft site.
  2.  The procedure reviews the catalog mapping file to organize the SkillSoft content into the  categories you have defined.
  3. The procedure checks for retired content and captures information for registered users and the status of the activity for each user. It then pushes a custom report to administrators.
  4. If the retired activity does not have registrations, the procedure creates a data file for processing into  SumTotal using TMU to deactivate the learning activity.
  5. Activities are assigned categories, subcategories, metadata, content types and audiences in a flat file  that will be used by SumTotal TMU to process into SumTotal.

OLSA integration will allow you to configure your business rules to align your SkillSoft catalogs to your business needs. The effort is well spent in reducing the administrative burdens of library maintenance.

Avoid These Mistakes in Your ADP Integration with SumTotal

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ADP is an important world provider in the HR technology market and the leading vendor in North America, Latin America, and Europe. Since many of ADP’s thousands of customers use human capital management applications from different vendors, ADP has developed a variety of tools designed to ease data integration. Their robust suite of application program interfaces (API) enables customers to automatically push data from ADP into many other enterprise applications and data centers.

The primary requirement for a SumTotal Learning integration with ADP is to get employee, organization, and job data from ADP HRIS or Payroll. The integration manages synchronization of employee records and creates employee records in SumTotal when the customer creates them in ADP.

Based on our experience working with clients on both platforms, integration is a multi-step process which involves in getting the required data with an ADP API or a custom report. In the early days of online applications, many ADP customers used a custom report, manually manipulated the data in a spreadsheet, then uploaded it to the target application. APIs have now become so commonplace almost all organizations use APIs to extract the data and prepare it for import using the SumTotal DSU process.

It is simple, but there are a few exceptions. The following list is a guide to handling those exceptions as a part of your implementation plan.

  • In some cases, organizations will have different organization codes or job codes in ADP and SumTotal. Make sure to create              accurate mapping between them for the API to create the file for SumTotal DSU.
  • When clients create new jobs or departments in ADP, they need to be linked to the domain structure in the LMS.                                Administrators need to update and submit an organization and jobs file before processing the employee file into SumTotal.
  • The ADP schema contains a both a file number and an employee number. In some cases, the file number and employee               number are different. In most cases customers use file number as the unique employee identifier. We have found the best             practice is to use the employee number as the unique identifier in SumTotal by appropriately mapping the two fields.
  • There may be a difference in user status in the two applications. Since ADP is the organization’s system of record, make sure         the API updates the status in SumTotal.

Some customers process a termination of employment and a rehire when an employee moves from one organizational unit to another, usually mandated by how the company’s financial system manages costing. ADP tries to send two records for the same employee, one with terminated status and other with an active status. The quick and easy solution is to build rules into the transformation so the process retains the active record and rejects the terminated record.

  • There may be occasions to use additional business rules to data files, especially if you are using custom fields. The best place to handle the rules is in the data transformation in the API.

Consistent and stable integrations between your business platforms ease the burdens on your administrators, reduces errors, and helps to unify data for advanced analytics. That can have a significant impact on your business.

Pixentia is a full-service technology company dedicated to helping clients solve business problems, improve the capability of their people, and achieve better results.

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