Workday Assistant / Chat Bot

Workday Assistant / Chat Bot is the new feature with release R1 2020(34)

We can enable users to perform HCM related tasks and retrieve Workday information by having a conversation with the Assistant chatbot.

Examples:

• Show my playslip
• Request time off and view balances.
• View worker and manager information.
• Initiate a location or supervisory organization change.

Workday also supports Assistant on mobile.

Assistant doesn't support proxy users.

In Non-Production tenants, when you proxy as some one, the bot will still consider you as the user and provide your information and not the one whom you are proxy-ing. Which is correct.

How to Know When the Tenant is Available after Schedule Updates

How to Know When the Tenant is Available after Schedule Updates

As we learnt, Workday Tenants are unavailable during .Weekly Service Updates and Workday Feature Releases

Your tenants some times may be available before the scheduled end time.  If you would like to be notified when any of your tenants become available after a Weekly Service Update or a Workday Feature Release,

Follow the below sequence of steps in which ever tenant the notification is required:

1. Create Custom Report - You can create your custom report with any report data source and fields. 
2. Create a new EIB Outbound Integration and use the newly created custom report as the data source. No Transformation required.
3. Use ‘Workday Attachment’ as the Delivery Method.
4. Set up the EIB Integration Notification (Trigger on Launch) to trigger when this EIB is launched. - Provide email IDs or Distribution list as who need to receive the notification also configure the Subject appropriately to indicate that your (PROD / Sandbox / Implementation etc.,) Workday tenant is available
5. Schedule the EIB to run after the maintenance window begins.( Weekly Recurrence 6:30pm PT on Friday for Sandbox and 12:30 am PT on Saturday for Production) 
6. When the service update is complete, the EIB will trigger automatically, and the notification email will be sent to indicate the tenant's availability.

Specially for Sandbox notifications, create the schedule in your Production tenant so that it copies over during the weekly Sandbox refresh.

Restricted to Environment - Sandbox  6:30pm PT on Friday
Restricted to Environment - Production 12:30 am PT on Saturday

Workday is planning for zero downtime as part of roadmap so, the above process would no longer be needed for the users to configure.

Workday Schedules ( Service Updates )

Feature Releases and Service Updates

There are two Types of Schedules that you can notice in Workday. One is Feature release which is like an upgrade and the other being Service updates which is like regular maintenance, or applying patches, fixes.

 Feature release:

Workday Feature releases occur 2 times per year. Version Change happens with every Feature release. (Not Future release)

Do remember every single customer will be on the same version and it is the latest version.

This includes New or Feature releases, Enhancements, Bug Fixes, additional Packaged Integrations etc.,
When Workday rollout the updates, the customer system automatically converts to the newest release.
Tenants are not available during the Feature release Weekend (which happens 2 times every year)

Dates: ( 2019 - 20 - 21 Schedule )

Previous Version - 32

February 4, 2019 - Features available for Preview

March     9,  2019 - Workday 32 available in all tenants

Previous Version - 33

August       3,  2019 - Features available for Preview

September 7,  2019 - Workday 33 available in all tenants

Here on the Versions are called with Year and Release, Example: 2020R1 , 2020R2 instead of WD34, WD35

Previous Version - Workday 2020 Release 1

February 1,  2020 - Features available for Preview

March      7,  2020 - 2020R1 available in all tenants

Previous Version - Workday 2020 Release 2

August        8,  2020 - Features available for Preview

September 12,  2020 - 2020R2 available in all tenants

Upcoming Version - Workday 2021 Release 1

February 6,  2021 - Features available for Preview

March    13,  2021 - 2021R1 available in all tenants

Service Updates:

Fixes are applied every Friday during Scheduled timings in the service updates.

During the scheduled updates you will notice the tenant will be down and a message saying "Workday is currently unavailable." with the duration of outage. Its generally a 12 hour window on a weekend for Non-Production environments.