With Extend, you can..

The Workday Extend platform introduces tremendous potential to Workday customers, allowing them to take advantage of their Workday investment in many ways not possible before. It could fulfill numerous requirements that Workday customers might have set aside for too long as not possible. So, “What exactly can I do with Extend?” is a question many customers ask, despite having dipped their toes in Extend sessions. This is an attempt to explain to newcomers to Extend that with Extend, you can:

• Develop Custom apps with custom pages that can serve a discrete function to Workday users and one that does not depend on any existing functionality or business process.

• Create custom apps with custom pages that collect data, process data, and , use that data to trigger existing business processes within Workday. This pattern could also be reversed i.e., an existing business process could be made to trigger a custom app workflow.

• Build standalone business objects – This is very similar to the concept of custom objects, but custom objects rely on an existing Workday business object on top of which they are created. However, Workday Extend business objects are truly standalone and can be crafted with any combination of multi-level relationships like any Workday business object.

• Build Custom Business Processes – Many Functional consultants after having gotten used to the fact that Workday’s Delivered Business processes are the only way to invoke a BP transaction are often pleasantly surprised to learn that with Extend, a Customer can define a brand new BP and call it how they want. This BP can be configured to collect data for a custom object(s) and will come with ‘the works’, the same configure ability as any other BP, BP security policy, etc. Contrarily, an Extend app can function without any BP behind it as well if it doesn’t need one.

• Create Orchestrations that perform any combination of elaborate Operations involving extracting/updating data via web service, extracting data, triggering delivered/custom BPs etc. Orchestrations on their own without any Extend app is the upcoming concept of “Orchestrations for Integrations” and has tremendous potential to democratize Integration development.

• Secure all this with the legendary rock-solid Workday Configurable security you are used to. And yes, you can create custom domains and policies to secure your custom Objects so that you can maintain the security of the data in your custom objects in the same fluid way you are already used to.

• Report on all of the above like you would do with any other Business object and Business process. There are some nuances around reporting but that’s for another day. This is an attempt to give a very high-level overview of the capabilities of workday.

  If you want to learn more about how we can help with your Workday projects, let’s connect.