Workday Talent Management

What do you like best?

The APIs provided by Workday provide all of the tools required to automate and integrate with local systems in real-time. The structure of these services can be a bit clunky - while it looks like they are working on REST implementations, the bulk of the work still needs to be done using SOAP APIs. That said, with a little bit of effort, there is very little this hosted solution provides that cannot be handled through their APIs, making powerful automation and custom solutions possible.

What do you dislike?

I mentioned the SOAP services - I actually don't automatically see this as a downside. While they have gone out of vogue in favor of REST APIs, I've always found SOAP straightforward to work with. However, there are a couple of downsides. First off, support for SOAP is slowly going away in modern platforms (.Net Core, for example, is missing some key elements for full support of WS-Security). Second, the services offered by Workday are ENORMOUS. As a result, some automated code gen tools (notably Visual Studio's "Add Service Reference" function) can get overwhelmed by the size. I found that after adding certain Workday WSDLs in Visual Studio, the IDE slowed and eventually crashed when trying to look at the generated code.

Finally, while there is extensive documentation for these services, it is often not very useful. A field might be labeled as needing to be a valid id type, but give no indication as to what the possible valid id types are.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using this system to present training opportunities to our employees, and record training history. In particular the processes I have worked on involve loading records of training history from other venues outside of Workday into the Workday system for central history management and reporting. This allows us to offer training opportunities from other third party trainers, and then pull and load that history into Workday.