New Features for EIBs in Workday® 2020R1
Workday 2020R1 has two exciting new features for Enterprise Interface Builders (EIBs), support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and XLSX support.
Amazon S3
Workday has finally allowed data retrieval and delivery from Amazon S3, not only in EIBs but also in business processes in general. Amazon S3 is an object storage solution designed to give greater access and control to data than traditional SFTP environments.
Inbound EIBs
Workday 2020R1 now allows you to to utilize Amazon S3 as a retrieval method. You can configure this as follows:
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In the “Get Data” portion of the EIB set the retrieval method to Amazon S3.
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Once selected as the retrieval method, contextual options will appear for you to configure the region, bucket, access key ID, secret key and file name.
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Under the details tab, an AWS KMS alias can be used to decrypt the file, but a KMS Region will have to be selected to do so.
When properly configured, the EIB can import the data automatically from the appropriate Amazon S3 bucket and bring it directly into Workday. All other EIB steps function as normal.
Outbound EIBs
The new support for Amazon S3 allows outbound EIBs to push data into an Amazon S3 bucket. The setup of an outbound EIB using Amazon S3 is the same now as any other outbound EIB with the exception of the delivery step. Under delivery method there is now an “Amazon Simple Storage Service” option. When selected, fields will appear to let you specify the bucket, region, access key id, and file name just like on inbound EIBs. Also just like inbound Amazon S3 EIBs, if you open up the details menu and select a KMS alias you will have to specify the KMS region.
The end result of this setup is the transfer of the outbound files from Workday to your Amazon S3 bucket without any intermediaries.
XLSX Support
Until Workday 2020R1, Inbound EIBs could only be configured with XML templates. In the latest version of Workday you can now use XSLX files for inbound templates.
If you weren’t already aware, XSLX files are a common spreadsheet format most often used with Microsoft Excel. At the time of writing it is the default format Excel saves files unless configured otherwise.
To use this feature, go to the related actions on an inbound EIB that you wish to use an XSLX file as a template for. Select Template Model -> Generate Data. This will bring you to a screen where you can select the spreadsheet generation format as well as if you want data to be auto generated.
If you select XLSX an integration will run to generate the template file.
Benefits and Considerations
XSLX files are smaller than XML files. Since they are already the most common Excel format, it is easier to convert pre-existing excel data into an XSLX template. XML files are not always designed to function in Excel so this could lead to some ambiguity that would not occur if a system were running entirely off XSLX files.
Do I have to opt in to these new features?
No, when your tenant is updated to 2020R1 the features should automatically be enabled without needing any special care or attention from you.
Do I need to update old systems?
You only need to update older EIBs, business processes, and integrations if you want to take advantage of these new features and the old processes interfere due to expected file formats or delivery/retrieval destinations. It is recommended that you test any integrations and business processes that use these EIBs if you choose to use these new features.
In summary, you can expect the following when it comes to EIBs and Workday 2020R1:
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Workday now supports data retrieval and delivery from Amazon S3
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In this latest version of Workday you can use XSLX files for inbound templates (previously EIBs had to be configured with XML templates)
