Chapter Contents

CHAPTER 6

Workday Extend, Integrations, and More: Build Agile Solutions

Workday extensibility and composability for IT leaders: Technology built for adaptability.

The Workday extensible architecture, with its broad set of APIs, prebuilt components, and integration tools, enables a high degree of composability. This allows developers to assemble solutions quickly by combining existing elements rather than building everything from scratch.

CHAPTER 6

Workday Extend, integrations, and more: Build agile solutions.

Workday extensibility and composability for IT leaders: Technology built for adaptability.

Building on the Workday platform.

Power to extend

Build unique apps for your organization by extending Workday.

Power to integrate

Bringing Workday Orchestrate to integrations.

Power of ecosystem

Solving business needs faster together with Built on Workday.

Power to extend

Build unique apps for your organization by extending Workday.

Power to integrate

Bringing Workday Orchestrate to integrations.

Power of ecosystem

Solving business needs faster together with Built on Workday.

IT leaders facing compressed timelines for digital transformation need technology built for adaptability. Traditional applications with closed architectures require customization and refactoring to change, bringing high costs and long wait times.

Workday offers a different approach with an adaptable platform for HR and finance. With the Workday platform, business users can operate with agility, modifying processes in real time through self-service configuration. Developers can build new apps to meet unique business needs by extending data models, creating new business processes, and integrating with other systems in the IT landscape.

In this chapter, we explore how the Workday platform architecture and capabilities support extensibility.

The power to integrate.

Seventeenth-century English author John Donne once said, “No man is an island.” The same can be said for enterprise software.

Workday customers need integrations with many third-party applications and service providers to conduct day-to-day operations. Here’s one common scenario: A retailer needs to integrate with an elaborate financial management ecosystem of providers to support operations such as merchandising, order management, accounts payable automation, and transportation management. Or a customer needs to integrate a downstream system with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to share relevant details around the employee lifecycle and trigger point-in-time events.

Figure 6-1. Build and manage integrations directly in Workday.

Integrating with external systems is often a challenge for IT teams. Workday simplifies this by providing built-in interoperability as a core part of the Workday platform. This enables IT teams to connect systems quickly, securely, and flexibly. Workday integration tools streamline the integration process and offer multiple customization options. Because integration is a core component of the Workday platform, custom integrations don’t require customers to source or manage separate, costly integration middleware.

Workday provides a set of integration capabilities built to synchronize data with the many systems customers use. In addition, Workday provides services that manage the scheduling and runtime operations of these integrations, which can be developed by Workday, our partners, or our customers. All integrations run in a secure, scalable, and supervised environment.

Workday integration capabilities are guided by the following principles:

Integrations are open and standards-based

A catalog of prebuilt integrations is fully maintained by Workday or our certified partners, saving customers time and money

Management capabilities are built in to provide control over integrations, including full audit and troubleshooting capabilities

All integrations leverage and support self-service through the same Workday security model built into the Workday platform

Support for a wide array of integration needs.

Workday and our certified partners provide prebuilt integration connectors that handle the wide variances in data formats and protocols that come with various customer integration requirements. For integrations that require customization beyond what’s provided with prebuilt connectors, Workday offers a spectrum of tools and technologies ranging from low-code and no-code tools designed for business analysts to custom integration developer environments.

Workday provides the following integration tools to accelerate integration development.

Workday Orchestrate.

Figure 6-2. Rapidly build complex workflows with Workday Orchestrate.

With Workday Orchestrate, customers have the power to rapidly build complex workflows, automating and transforming data across both Workday and external systems. By connecting Workday to virtually any system or data source, Workday Orchestrate provides the tools to break down data silos and streamline processes to drive innovation. With its powerful low-code automation capabilities, businesses can drive greater automation and refine business operations, unlocking more value from their Workday investment.

Customers and partners use Workday Orchestrate to:

Establish bidirectional data flows, including real-time integrations, with access to external APIs and public Workday APIs

Expand Workday capabilities by creating custom integration solutions and automating complex, cross-system workflows

Empower business users to design, build, and deploy integrations without extensive technical expertise, reducing reliance on IT and speeding up time to value

Figure 6-3. Unlock more value with Workday Orchestrate.

Simplified Workday integrations with enterprise interface builder.

The enterprise interface builder (EIB) provides the simplest approach to integration with Workday. With the EIB, developer expertise is not required—business analysts can create basic, one-way-in or one-way-out integrations with a forms-based user interface.

Figure 6-4. Integration tools designed to address simple and complex use cases.

Connectors.

Connectors drastically reduce deployment time by providing the processing logic, data transformation, and error-handling details required to integrate a third-party system with Workday. All connectors are configurable for different customer situations.

Connectors are managed just like any other Workday product and follow the same update schedule. In addition to regular core updates, Workday manages a joint roadmap with third-party partners to ensure connector integrations stay current as applications evolve.

APIs.

Integration and app developers may also build integrations, orchestrations, and apps by interacting directly with Workday APIs. We offer both SOAP and REST APIs.

SOAP APIs in Workday are built on W3C specifications (SOAP and WSDL protocols) and are primarily intended for system-to-system integration, where large sets of data are exchanged. The SOAP API uses XML and is often called the Web Services API in the Workday Community.

REST APIs are built on well-known REST principles and are extensively used in consumer-facing interfaces, including websites and ubiquitous computing devices. Workday recommends using a REST API when small units of data are being exchanged. REST APIs are now a foundational technology for application development. Workday is continually expanding API offerings to meet evolving customer needs.

Reporting-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a type of REST API that supports the creation of user-defined read-only APIs when a custom report, created in Workday or with a Workday Extend app, is enabled as a web service. Once enabled, the data can be accessed using multiple formats including JSON, CSV, XML, and more.

Workday Graph API assists Workday Extend app developers in working with data in their Workday Extend apps. Workday Graph API uses the standard query language GraphQL, which enables developers to ask for the exact data they need in a single request, simplifying the coding process and improving app performance.

Streamlining the API experience with Workday Graph API.

Figure 6-5. Assisting developers in working with data in their Workday Extend apps.

Workday Studio.

At the other end of the integration use-case spectrum, Workday Studio supports highly customized and more-complex integrations. Workday Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for technical users building complex integrations between Workday and third-party systems. Regardless of the customization needed, the end result of using Workday Studio is the same as with using the EIB: an integration system that can be scheduled to execute and be managed in the Workday cloud. Workday Studio and the EIB are core to the Workday platform and included with the purchase of any Workday application.

Improving the power to adapt through integrations.

These open, interoperable integration capabilities empower an organization’s entire IT ecosystem, regardless of size or complexity. These capabilities are managed and secured by Workday and provide the ability for both IT and the business to build integrations, resulting in faster time to value and significant cost savings—in stark contrast to the often-lengthy procurement and stand-up processes required by legacy systems.

Workday integration services adhere to the same strict security model applied to all data in Workday. As data is shared from an inbound or outbound integration, it’s subject to the highest level of privacy and security compliance and always remains auditable.

The architecture of Workday integrations.

Figure 6-6. Integrations district on the city map.

Within the map, the integrations district is deeply embedded into the Workday architecture city and has access to the Workday platform object management services (OMS) and persistence services through an API gateway.

Integrations are managed by an overarching integration framework and can be launched in multiple ways:

On a schedule based on custom frequencies
Manually by a user
Automatically as part of a business process
From external systems
From Workday Extend
From a journey in Workday Journeys

This enables custom workflows and data synchronization to be carefully tailored to meet the specific needs of users without unnecessary complexity.

Workday integrations are scalable, secure, and fully auditable. Integrations are scaled using a grid approach. The compute grid is a collection of virtual machines used to run integrations at scale. Each integration is run in isolation, as it may contain code from customers or consultants.

An integration supervisor, deployed in the Scala programming language and the Akka open-source toolkit, manages the compute grid representing resources available for integrations. The supervisor identifies a free resource and deploys integration code to it, and the integration extracts data through the API gateway, either by invoking RaaS or by using a SOAP or REST API.

A typical integration transforms data into a file in comma-separated values (CSVs) or extensible markup language (XML) and delivers it using secure file transfer protocol (SFTP). To support full auditability, the integration supervisor stores a copy of the file and corresponding audit files in the documents store before freeing up compute resources for the next integration.

The power to build with Workday Extend.

Our final district is home to Workday Extend—a place for IT and business developers to build new and unique apps with capabilities for people and finance. For Workday customers, Workday Extend is a key part of the value of the Workday platform—and enables organizations to extend that value.

Figure 6-7. Workday Extend district on the city map.

Workday customers and partners use Workday Extend to build new apps that help their organizations consolidate systems, respond to unplanned events, and continuously innovate in unique ways. Developers can build apps rapidly with Workday Extend using Workday platform components and low- and no-code tools and run their apps confidently in the Workday cloud—knowing the apps adopt Workday proven cloud delivery processes. As a result, business and IT leaders gain more from their investment with each new app. With low- and no-code development tools and AI assistance, teams confidently create new capabilities that leverage context around people and finance.

Workday Extend Low- and no-code app development platform.

App Components

Data

Logic

Security

AI Gateway

Developer Tools

Development Environments

Code & Visual Authoring

Gen AI Developer Copilot

Logging & Monitoring

Lifecycle Management

Developer Experience

Developer Community

Docs & Tutorials

Workday DevCon & Knowledge Sharing Events

App Gallery & Catalog

Support

App Components

Data

Logic

Security

AI Gateway

Developer Tools

Development Environments

Code & Visual Authoring

Gen AI Developer Copilot

Logging & Monitoring

Lifecycle Management

Developer Experience

Developer Community

Docs & Tutorials

Workday DevCon & Knowledge Sharing Events

App Gallery & Catalog

Support

Building on Workday Extend gives us a way to harness the power of the Workday platform. Not only do we develop faster but we also don’t need additional resources or tools. We also avoided importing or exporting Workday data. Workday Extend really opens doors for customers to innovate.

Kapil Sood Manager of Finance Applications, Netflix

Two Workday Extend offerings are available to meet customers where they are on their journey to build new apps.

Workday Extend Essentials helps teams get started with Workday Extend. It provides intuitive low- and no-code tooling and support for customers to build their first apps. Developers have unlimited support for apps in development and the ability to promote up to three apps into production.

Workday Extend Professional provides everything in Workday Extend Essentials, plus support for promoting up to 10 apps into production. It also offers additional innovations for developers, such as Gen AI developer assistance through Workday Extend Developer Copilot and AI services via APIs.

And if organizations want to develop more apps, they can request additional Workday Extend app packs to bring more Workday Extend apps into production.

The architecture of Workday Extend.

Workday Extend is hosted in the Workday public cloud infrastructure and operates as a seamless component of the Workday platform. It supports developers in building unique apps that are created, updated, deployed, and maintained by customers within their Workday tenant, and published according to their own build-and-release cycles.

A peek inside Workday Extend.

When you check under the hood, you’ll see that Workday Extend includes:

Presentation components. Workday Extend developers build with presentation (user interface, or UI) components enabling apps to surface within their core Workday products including Workday HCM, Workday Financial Management, and Workday Student.

App model components. When building apps with Workday Extend, customers use the native capabilities of Workday to create new business objects, business processes, tasks, reports, and security domains.

Process orchestrations and integrations. Workday Extend includes Workday Orchestrate, which allows customers to build orchestrations that flexibly combine Workday business processes with third-party service APIs.

Low- and no-code developer tools. Workday Extend provides developers with low- and no-code tools to build, deploy, and manage their apps. For example, the web-based Workday Extend App Builder and orchestration builder help developers author their app source code, and the Workday developer site provides documentation, an API explorer, an app catalog providing quick-start reference applications, and a developer forum for sharing developer guidance and app ideas.

Workday Extend Developer Copilot. For Workday Extend Professional developers, Workday Extend Developer Copilot is a Gen AI-enabled developer experience.

API endpoint and routing. The Workday Extend API gateway is the underlying infrastructure that provides a secure, unique gateway endpoint for all app API requests made by customer Workday Extend apps within a particular region.

Workday AI Gateway. Workday AI Gateway provides Workday-delivered AI API services for use in Workday Extend apps. These APIs are made available through the Workday Extend API gateway. Developers leverage them within Workday Extend app pages for real-time embedded AI and from Workday Orchestrate for more complex logic and processing.

Third-party integrations with AWS. Workday Extend Professional includes a third-party integration to support building apps with AWS capabilities, such as AWS Lambda, all supported with security controls.

App source management. Workday Extend includes the app hub, which hosts app source code and compiled artifacts and coordinates the app deployment and promotion lifecycle—from development to production.

App monitoring and logging. All Workday Extend interactions are securely logged and available for administrators and developers through the Workday Extend developer site.

Figure: 6-8. Workday Extend architecture.

Multiregion support.

Workday Extend is deployed across multiple regions globally, including within the FedRAMP boundary where required. This deployment model—along with dedicated gateway endpoints for each region—ensures that all user interactions in an app will stay within the region where it’s deployed, with no routing of data between regions.

Tools for developing Workday Extend apps.

Workday Extend App Builder: Low- and no-code tooling.

Workday Extend App Builder is the web-based developer environment providing a shared canvas for both IT and business developers to collaborate and rapidly build new Workday Extend apps.

With Workday Extend App Builder, teams build within a browser-based experience with visual and preview modes. Developers access Workday Extend App Builder through developer.workday.com, the Workday developer site.

To start building in Workday Extend App Builder, a developer can start from scratch, upload an existing file, work with a previously deployed app, or copy code from an app catalog app template. Within Workday Extend App Builder, the developer and their teams have support for the full Workday Extend app development lifecycle, and they can build with confidence because Workday Extend App Builder automatically preserves code changes as they are made.

Workday Extend developers use Workday Extend App Builder and the developer site to:

Author app components, orchestrations, and pages
Validate the syntax and semantics of an app at any time before deploying it
View build, debug, and API logs
Save the app to the app hub
Promote an app into developer, implementation, sandbox, or production

When building new apps in the Workday Extend App Builder, developers build at multiple levels of abstraction from full coding to low- and no-code modes. They author app components directly on the developer site. In addition, app components can be generated directly from business objects, using a capability called component generation.

For a no-code approach to building apps, Workday Extend App Builder supports visual mode. With visual mode, developers can:

Create new pages by adding tags and adjusting their attributes in an intuitive graphical interface
Create scripts for pages
Add context-free tasks, business objects, attachments, business processes, security domains, and reports to Workday Extend apps—all without dealing with code

Workday Extend apps can be previewed with Workday Extend App Builder app preview before being deployed to App Hub, so developers and business users can see the fruits of their labor and make any needed adjustments before saving for promotion into a customer’s tenant.

And if development teams want to engage directly with the underlying code? Well, Workday Extend App Builder offers that too.

Workday Extend Developer Copilot: An AI developer companion.

For Workday Extend Professional customers, Workday Extend Developer Copilot brings the power of Gen AI to Workday Extend. Together, Workday developers and the intelligence provided by Workday Extend Developer Copilot increase developer productivity and help build Workday Extend apps faster.

Workday Extend Developer Copilot provides search, summarization, chat, and code generation. Following are some key capabilities.

AI summarization in the search box and in the Workday Extend Developer Copilot chat window. Workday Extend Developer Copilot summarizes the documentation and provides the information needed from Workday Extend App Builder, the console, or anywhere on the developer site without switching context.

Developer AI chat. Workday Extend Developer Copilot chat uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) from multiple sources. Examples include:

Product documentation on the developer site
REST API OpenAPI specifications on the REST API Explorer
Graph API schema in the Graph API Explorer

AI code generation in Workday Extend App Builder. When designing or building an app, developers use natural language to ask Workday Extend Developer Copilot to generate app components. Examples include:

Workday Graph API queries and mutations
Example pages with supported widgets
Pages that use Workday Graph API to access and update data

Prompt library in the generate components interface for help getting started with Gen AI prompts.

After Workday Extend Developer Copilot generates components, developers can add them directly to their app to accelerate prototyping, development, and testing. Workday Extend Developer Copilot is built on Google Gemini with additional curated training data based on Workday documentation, Workday Extend code samples, and Workday Extend-specific questions and concepts. Customer apps and Workday tenant data are never transmitted to or used to train Workday Extend Developer Copilot or its underlying language models.

App components: The building blocks of Workday Extend apps.

Developers build Workday Extend apps by extending the core components of the Workday platform, including Workday business objects and attachment objects, security model, configurable business process framework, reporting framework, and user experience (such as pages and tasks). These components provide the building blocks that developers use to construct the user interface, data, logic, and security layers of a Workday Extend app.

Workday Extend app components fit into the following three categories:

Presentation components, which build the app UI and UX
Model components, including business and attachment objects, business processes, security domains, and reports
Orchestration components, which orchestrate flows between processes in Workday and between Workday and third-party systems

Let’s dive deeper into each of these components.

Figure 6-9. Workday Extend App Builder components.

Presentation components: Building the user experience.

Developers work in Workday Extend App Builder with Workday Extend presentation components to create the user interface and page interactions of a Workday Extend app using JSON.

In Workday Extend App Builder’s visual mode, no coding is required and users can build presentation components by completing a simple form. Workday Extend custom pages have JSON-based PMD tags that define elements of the page behavior, including widgets aligned with the Workday look and feel, endpoints that access data using Workday and third-party REST APIs, flows for page navigation, custom error pages, and translated content.

Developers can use PMD scripting to perform data manipulations, calculations, and validations within a Workday Extend app page display and interactions.

Developers create custom tasks to open Workday Extend app pages from within Workday. Custom tasks enable Workday users to access Workday Extend apps from the Workday home page, hubs, global search and navigation, custom dashboards, related actions, and profile groups. All Workday Extend apps can be accessed from both web and mobile.

Model components: Building app functionality.

Model components are responsible for the core functionality of any Workday Extend app. Workday Extend app developers use model components to create app data, process logic, and security.

Developers use Workday Extend App Builder to author these model components either in code mode with JSON or in visual mode by completing simple forms that generate components. Model components include:

Business objects that extend the Workday object model, creating new objects unique to the Workday Extend app
Business processes that extend the Workday business process framework, creating net-new business processes
Attachment objects that store file data and images
Security domains that extend the Workday configurable security model to confidently secure app data
Tasks to integrate Workday Extend apps into the core Workday platform
Components to create Workday standard and advanced reports

Developers can validate their code and preview their app pages and components in the Workday Extend App Builder app preview before deploying to a developer tenant.

Orchestration components: Creating process flows between Workday and third-party systems.

Orchestration components enable Workday Extend app developers to develop real-time, event-driven processes across Workday and other external systems. Developers use orchestrations to create and update Workday data, trigger business processes, send notifications, and connect to third-party APIs.

Orchestrations are created using orchestration builder, which is accessed on the Workday developer site. Orchestration builder provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and features a powerful expression builder that provides developers with a low-code solution for function and condition manipulation.

Orchestration builder enables the following features:

Real-time API integration. Orchestrations use event-based, transactional integrations—without integrations needing to be batched.

Lightweight integrations. Orchestration builder’s data manipulation and transformation features are built for speed.

Data accessibility. Data brought into an orchestration is automatically available everywhere in that orchestration, and developers can mix JSON and XML.

Rapid function and condition manipulation through expression builder’s low-code experience.

A simple Workday Extend app example: Charitable donations.

Let’s bring it all together with a simple example of a Workday Extend app. In this case, the developer’s goal was to enable users to make donations to a selection of approved charities directly in Workday and have those donations pulled directly from their pay.

1

The first task was to build a Workday Extend app that works with Workday core HCM and Workday Payroll. The app would create two new Workday Extend business objects for charity and charitable donation and a new attachment object to hold a digital image representing a charity.

2

Next up was the creation of three new business processes: to enable an administrator to create the charity and upload its image, to manage charities (in case of changes to the charity), and to allow users to make and manage their charitable donations.

3

The developer then used those components, along with Workday Extend presentation components, to build within Workday Extend App Builder the custom app pages that users and administrators would interact with to support the process of charitable donations. These pages could surface directly on the Workday home page, through a task in a hub, or via global navigation.

4

A developer teammate with expertise in building orchestrations stepped in to create the flow that would initiate a payroll event once the user made their donation. That orchestration could be linked to a Workday Payroll business process or to an external third-party payroll provider.

All the authoring of new data objects, business processes, UI pages, and orchestrations were done directly within the Workday developer site and with the Workday Extend App Builder low- and no-code experience.

Figure 6-10. A simple Workday Extend app example: charitable donations.

Supporting the Workday Extend app lifecycle.

In Workday Extend, app source components are treated as a single logical unit that can be managed and deployed across many customer tenants—without requiring manual code migration or elevated privileges for app developers.

Figure 6-11. The Workday Extend app lifecycle.

The composition of a Workday Extend app.

Workday Extend apps are composed of data, process, and presentation components. The source code for each component type is stored in logical folders managed by Workday Extend App Builder. Developers use Workday Extend App Builder to develop and maintain an app’s source code and upload it to the app hub service.

App development and promotion.

With Workday Extend, developers iteratively develop and test apps across multiple environments. This iterative approach ensures that apps are working properly before they are installed in a production environment.

Developers upload source code to app hub, and app hub compiles the code into a build that can be promoted. Developers then promote Workday Extend apps through four promotion levels: development, implementation release, sandbox release, and released. Each promotion level maps to the runtime environment of the tenant on which the app is being deployed or installed. Developers can take different actions at each promotion level.

Development. Building an app always starts at the development promotion level. Developers can build their app within their Workday Extend development tenants or using their customer implementation environment tenant.
Implementation release. When app development is complete, the version gets promoted as a release candidate to the implementation release promotion level for testing with customer data within an implementation environment.
Sandbox release. If an app was developed in an implementation tenant, it then gets promoted to sandbox release promotion level for further testing.
Released. The last step is promotion to released. Only versions that are at the released promotion level can be installed into a customer’s production environment.

App installation and upgrades.

Apps are made available for installation and automatic upgrades in a customer’s implementation, sandbox, and production tenants by promoting the app version through the Workday Extend developer site console. To install a promoted app, a customer’s Workday tenant administrator will log in to the Workday tenant and use the app manager to install the app into the Workday tenant. If the app is already installed in the sandbox or production tenant, the promotion event triggers an automatic upgrade to the newly promoted version.

More app lifecycle tools: Development tenants and console.

To aid with app development, Workday Extend development tenants include sample tenant data and the ability to install sample apps and jump-start development. Development tenants are kept up to date with weekly and biannual Workday application releases.

The console page on the Workday Extend developer site lets developers see app details—such as name, last modification by whom and when, and the status of the most recent development build—and manage apps all in one place. Developers can promote app versions to higher levels and initiate app installation to tenants where the app isn’t installed yet.

The Workday developer site: Home base for Workday Extend developers.

All Workday Extend developers have access to the Workday developer site, a highly active forum for learning about and building Workday Extend apps and orchestrations. Developers can find the tools they need to build and manage Workday Extend apps—as well as explore APIs they may be using to build out their Workday Extend apps through the Workday SOAP, REST, and Graph API Explorer capabilities.

The site also includes Workday Extend documentation, training, and tutorials for learning to build Workday Extend apps—and to level up existing skills. Developers can also leverage the app catalog to search for prebuilt solutions as springboards for building Workday Extend apps.

Figure 6-12. Start building with prebuilt solutions from the app catalog.

Workday Extend meets AI.

Workday Extend provides multiple avenues for developers to unlock AI responsibly.

Workday Extend opens up developer access to AI with Workday Illuminate™.

Through the Workday AI Gateway, provided with Workday Extend Professional, developers can build intelligent and responsible apps using Workday-delivered AI service APIs. Workday will also keep adding AI services to the Workday AI Gateway over time, providing a continuous pipeline of AI innovation for Workday Extend app development.

Workday AI Gateway Our AI models, in the hands of developers.

Figure 6-13. AI services available with the Workday AI Gateway.

Workday Extend developers and AWS services.

Workday Extend Professional developers can use developer technologies from innovative AI technology providers while working with the confidence and trust that comes from building on Workday. Workday Extend Professional supports Workday Extend native integration with AWS technologies. With this integration, developers leverage AWS AI services and developer services including AWS Lamda, Amazon S3, and Amazon EventBridge.

Gen AI-assisted development.

With Workday Extend Developer Copilot, developers rapidly build code through prompts leveraging Gen AI to build more apps, build more quickly, and multiply value in Workday exponentially.

The Workday AI Gateway.

With Workday Illuminate™, AI is embedded in the Workday platform. For Workday Extend developers, Workday has opened many of these AI capabilities to use within Workday Extend apps—enabling developers to build new apps and experiences including cross-functional foundational machine learning services such as document intelligence.

The Workday AI Gateway brings Workday-delivered and -curated people and money large language models (LLMs) to Workday Extend Professional developers. Workday AI Gateway continuously learns from our trusted, highest-quality set of HR and financial data and provides APIs that:

Streamline information formats and identify errors
Handle processing of large-volume documents
Facilitate skills-based, intelligent solutions
Provide valuable insights around employee sentiment and for forecasting and informed decision-making
Automate repetitive, predictable tasks and processes for improved accuracy and productivity

Workday supports several AI services for developers—with many more planned—including the following:

Skills analysis. Leverage Workday Skills Cloud to compare and contrast skills.
Sentiment analysis. Analyze digital text to determine if the emotional tone of a message is positive, negative, or neutral.
Document intelligence. Tap into Workday-curated machine learning models to extract business-relevant fields from documents such as supplier invoices, receipts, resumes, and more.
ML forecasting. Use the ML Forecaster API and its time series forecasting capabilities to make seasonal and non-seasonal predictions.

The Workday AI Gateway is backed by the same trust and security model that underpins the Workday platform. When Workday Extend apps make API calls to Workday AI Gateway APIs, the API gateway handles identity, authorization, request routing, and transport security. All calls are handled centrally and consistently with other Workday APIs.

AWS AI and developer service innovation, native in Workday Extend.

Workday Extend Professional provides native support for powerful developer technologies from AWS, which jump-starts the building of Workday Extend apps while delivering best-practice security controls.

Workday provides preprovisioned AWS accounts configured to work optimally with both Workday and these AWS technologies:

Amazon S3: Support Workday Extend app data with cloud object storage.
AWS Lambda: Make synchronous function calls from Workday Orchestrate.
Amazon EventBridge: Handle asynchronous processing of events.
Amazon Rekognition: Leverage pretrained and customizable computer vision (CV) capabilities to extract information and insights from images and videos.
Amazon Comprehend: Tap into a natural-language processing service that uses ML to uncover insights and connections in text.
Amazon Textract: Extract texts from documents.
Amazon Translate: Provide language translation using trained neural networks.

When building apps with these AWS technologies, developers use Workday Extend Orchestrate components to get and store Workday objects from Amazon S3, invoke AWS Lambda functions, and put events on Amazon EventBridge.

Developers leverage these AWS technologies confidently, as Workday handles and simplifies provisioning and management of AWS service access. When Workday Extend developers use the Workday Extend native integration with AWS, they use a Workday-provided AWS account, which can only be accessed via Workday Orchestrate at runtime.

This AWS account is dedicated and isolated to each customer, with tight security controls that block public access and external network egress and apply service control policies (SCPs) to control permissions across the account. Data, configuration, code, and all other artifacts deployed to this account are isolated from other Workday customers.

Workday Extend and the art of the possible.

Workday customers turn to Workday Extend to meet their unique needs that go beyond our core delivered applications. Thousands of Workday customers are building apps with Workday Extend across three common categories:

Consolidate and simplify.

Org-specific needs often result in sourcing more applications and services. Over time, app portfolios can grow out of control, driving up costs and resource usage. Bringing capabilities into Workday with Workday Extend apps streamlines the experience for users while consolidating the portfolio for easier IT management and lower costs.

Innovate and differentiate.

Every organization or business has a unique path to success. In their efforts to grow revenue faster, compete harder, and retain and delight their employees, organizations turn to differentiated programs and processes that best fit their industry, region, market positioning, and culture. These unique requirements drive the need for new digital capabilities. Workday Extend apps are a fast and effective way to deliver on these goals.

Respond rapidly.

Plans change, often because of an unexpected external event. When faced with the need for rapid development, Workday Extend is the best tool for managing the unpredictable.

Consolidate and simplify.

Innovate and differentiate.

Respond rapidly.

Plans change, often because of an unexpected external event. When faced with the need for rapid development, Workday Extend is the best tool for managing the unpredictable.

Customers have built thousands of Workday Extend apps. Here are some highlights addressing needs for the office of the CHRO:

Promotion nominations (promotion nomination and selection, people leader nomination)
Recognition badges (worker recognition, recognition badges, charitable giving)
Vehicle registration (vehicle registration, parking management, public transit support)
Flexible work arrangements (work-from-home requests, return-to-office support, work from anywhere)
Bulk hiring and job change events
Incentives (unique bonus programs, sabbatical support, equity choice)
Education assistance (degree request and approval)

Document management (legal approvals and compliance, contract management)
International assignment (visa management, internal remote work approval)
Humanitarian relief (worker safety, disaster relief funding, evacuation support)
Travel management (international assignments, visa requests, work from almost anywhere, commuter guidance)
Region-specific benefits elections (buy-sell PTO, benefits shop)

Workday Extend apps also address needs for the office of the CFO across finance and accounting, expense management, and more—including, but not limited to:

Credit card requests (corporate credit card requests and management)
Supplier-managed requisitions (automation of external supplier PO requests)
Franchise billing (facilitation of calculation of fees and billing between franchisee and franchisor)
Education assistance (tuition reimbursement)
Transport claims (mileage calculation and automated public transportation purchase and expense)

Joint venture accounting
Capital planning
Sales opportunity tracking
Wellness reimbursement (wellness and safety funding and expensing, requesting support for worker populations in need such as disaster relief, specialized wellness funding plans)

In addition, Workday Extend addresses many education sector needs and supports Workday Student. Examples include:

University parking
One-time digital payments for research grants
Faculty workload manager
Request research grant payments
Student veteran benefits
External course catalog and registration
Bookstore course materials ordering
Noninstructional activity capture
Student success early alert management
Advising appointments
Legacy student data
Major/minor declaration and approval

And the number of unique Workday Extend apps solving an expanding list of use cases keeps growing. Read about some of the latest in our Workday Extend customer app gallery.

Taking Workday Extend forever forward.

To meet evolving needs, respond swiftly to the unexpected, and streamline IT systems, organizations need to innovate alongside Workday. Workday Extend equips business and IT teams with the tools, technologies, and ecosystem support necessary to build unique, powerful, intelligent, and interoperable people and finance apps at scale.

Developers can rapidly learn skills, prototype, and build the next generation of intelligent, AI-enabled apps that run natively on Workday, with the fast-advancing low- and no-code developer toolset and Gen AI capabilities of Workday Extend. And through the Workday AI Gateway and third-party AI services from cloud technology leaders such as AWS, developers can innovate responsibly with AI.

Beyond building: Extensibility via Workday Marketplace.

For Workday customers, platform and application extensibility is realized in multiple ways.

Workday customers can build custom solutions through the powerful integration, orchestration, and app-building tools covered in this chapter, and Workday also supports application extensibility via Workday Marketplace. To address more common business needs, Workday innovation partners participate in the Built on Workday program and list apps in the Workday Marketplace for purchase and broad distribution to Workday customers. These customers can then immediately adopt and deploy these apps for their organization.

Chapter 7 provides more information on the partner ecosystem and the Workday Marketplace.

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