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Integrations

Applaud unites your multiple back-end systems by giving employees a simple consumer-grade experience, where they can access all of their work services from one place. Content displayed on a page comes from models, and data in those models are usually loaded from an external third-party source. For example, a news feed from a SharePoint part, a list of employees from a core HR system, or a list of learning courses in a learning management system.

Applaud includes the Workato platform - a low-code best in class integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) tool that makes building integrations much easier. It includes over a thousand connectors for various enterprise tools and universal connectors for when a connector isn't available, such as when integrating with a custom system. Learn the basics of Workato in What is Workato?.

You build integrations by creating recipes. Most recipes take data from a third-party source and load it into Applaud models, or they take changes made to data in Applaud models and sync it back to third-party sources. You will typically create two types of recipes:

    • Initial data load. When first starting, you'll want a set of recipes that do a one-time batch load of data from a third-party source into an Applaud model. For example, a list of employees from your core HR. You'll typically only use this once in production and disable the recipe after use. You may choose to do a one-time import from a CSV or Excel file instead of using a one-time integration recipe.
    • Ongoing changes. You'll want recipes that sync ongoing changes. For example, loading new employees from your core HR into Applaud or notifying Applaud of leavers in your core HR. These recipes run indefinitely.

Your Applaud agreement will specify your Workato connection limit. The limit applies to your production tenant (you can experiment with other connectors in non-production tenants) and you will need a minimum of two connections (Applaud + something else). Any one recipe can use a maximum of four connections.

You also have a maximum task limit. These are limited to 5 million tasks per year for your production tenant, and a combined total of 300,000 tasks per year across all your non-production tenants. A 'job' is any action inside a recipe.

Care must be taken to design recipes to eliminate excessive task usage. For example, a recipe that iterates over 5,000 employees every day, searches for something in Applaud for each employee (one action), then creates or updates something in Applaud for each employee (one action), will use 5000 x 2 x 365 = 3,650,000 tasks a year. By contrast, if the same recipe only sent changes and bulk upserted these in batches of 50, rather than processing one-by-one, it would use as little as 365 tasks a year.

When creating recipes on development and testing on UAT, the expectation is that you limit processing in the recipe to a small subset of data rather than the full data set. For example, build and test on just 5 to 50 items, rather than thousands.

Your agreement with Applaud may include other integration bolt-ons, such as the On-premise Agent for behind-the-firewall connectivity, or workbots such as Teams and Slack.

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On the Integration page, you can create and manage your app connections and recipe workflows. This is all Workato functionality hosted in your Applaud tenant. If you require assistance, you can view their documentation, Workato docs. We've pulled out some of the main topics for the features you'll use in your Applaud tenant to help you find what you're after quicker.

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