Exciting New Features Announced at Workday DevCon 2024

Earlier this month at Workday DevCon 2024 in Las Vegas, a series of exciting new functionalities were unveiled, promising to transform the development experience on the Workday platform. Here's a look at some of the innovative features you can expect.

Built on Workday
Probably the biggest announcement at DevCon was the introduction of Built on Workday. This initiative allows partners to build, manage, and market apps on the Workday platform utilizing Workday Extend. The program will enable partners to develop unique apps that can be distributed via the Workday Marketplace to customers without the need to individually deploy code manually to each clients tenants. Available to eight early adopter partners this month, more partners will join in the second half of 2024.

Dark Mode (2024R2)
The highly anticipated Dark Mode is set to arrive in 2024 R2! Developers will now have the option to apply Dark Mode to both App Builder and Orchestration Builder. This feature not only enhances the visual appeal but also reduces eye strain, making extended coding sessions more comfortable.

Copilot for Workday Extend (2024R2)
Meet the Copilot for Workday Extend, an AI-powered developer companion designed to streamline your development process. This generative AI tool integrates seamlessly into your dev experience, enabling you to generate code, data queries, and mock data for testing with simple user prompts.

For example, you can start with a prompt like "I want to build a page to ..." and the Copilot will tailor the solution to your specific needs. Multiple prompts can be used to refine and customize your build further. With the "Add to App" button, you can effortlessly save the generated components to your Extend app.

The Developer Copilot also includes an interactive chat feature, allowing you to use natural language prompts to receive curated responses. Whether you need references, summaries, or specific code snippets, this tool has you covered.

Visual UI Mode in App Builder (Now Available)
A new Visual UI Mode in App Builder is now available in beta. This toggle feature enables developers to build business processes (BPs), business objects (BOs), security domains, and more with clicks instead of code. You can see a visual representation of a page (PMD), add or update components and their attributes in real-time, and preview changes live in App Preview. This feature simplifies the development process and makes it more accessible to developers of all skill levels.

Simplified ISU Configuration (2024R2)
The ISU configuration process has been significantly streamlined in the 2024 R2 release. The new approach allows for configuring system users for Extend apps up to 10 times faster. You can create ISU credentials directly in Extend, navigate to the Workday tenant, and click "Add System User" under "Integration System Users." Once the ISU is bound to the Workday Extend app, a new "Create API Client" button will set this up automatically, eliminating the need to navigate to other tasks within the tenant.

Quick Deploy Workday Extend Apps to IMPL (Later This Year)
Later this year, developers will be able to deploy Workday Extend apps to implementation tenants instantly, bypassing the promotion window. This feature will enable more agile responses to bugs and urgent feature requests, ensuring that your applications remain up-to-date and functional.

Bidirectional Relationships Between Extend and Workday Business Objects
Another groundbreaking feature is the ability to create bidirectional relationships between Extend and Workday Business Objects. This functionality allows you to connect Workday-delivered business objects to Extend Model Objects, enabling direct reporting of Extend data from Workday Data Sources. This serves as a powerful alternative to the limited custom object/additional data functionality currently available.

These features mark a significant leap forward in the capabilities offered to Workday developers, enhancing efficiency, flexibility, and ease of use. We are entering a whole new era of integration and technology stack capabilities, the old design rationales for integrations will no longer be sufficient. Start planning how you can leverage these tools to take your Workday development to the next level!