Sapling - Product Update, Summer 2023

Sapling’s New Look is HERE! 🥳

Introducing a slicker, more intuitive way to manage your people operations. 

Sapling’s brand-new look leverages a fresh but familiar design and the latest UI tech so you can continue to focus on the people, not the processes, and provide an outstanding employee experience! 

Here’s what’s in store for you:  

Automation: Build consistent, scalable workflows with powerful automation so you can onboard and advance your new hires efficiently.  

Flexibility: Manage your people data as you see fit and do more with these existing features. 

New Look & Feel: Make your people ops space your own and manage tasks easily on the go. 

API & Integration: Build on top of Sapling’s platform and efficiently connect your tools with integration supplements. 

A note on general availability

Not all updates are available to all customers and general availability will begin in early Summer. Check with your Kallidus representative to learn more.

• Customers running on our UK-hosted infrastructure (*.kallidus-suite.com/hr) will have access to Sapling's new look starting the last week of May.
• Customers running on our US-hosted infrastructure (*.saplingapp.io) will have access to Sapling's new look starting in mid-June.

There is no change you or your organization have to make to use Sapling's new look regardless of where your account is hosted.

Full change log

We've implemented several new features, enhancements, and improvements along with Sapling's brand new look. Shoutout to the many users that suggested ideas, participated in our beta trials, and shared feedback along the journey.

We've highlighted a few user-suggested updates that we're particularly excited to share

General user experience

• Menu navigation consolidated to a permissions-based top bar
• New user interface design working towards WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility certification with darker text, larger buttons, and screen-reader tagging
• Tasks view redesigned to see both the list of tasks and the task detail side-by-side
• Mobile-responsive design for better employee, manager, and (new!) admin experiences on smaller form factors
• Brand colors appear throughout Sapling, not just within the Preboarding experience
• More helpful messaging when an action fails validation or an error occurs
• Improved overall load time and processing performance
• Consistent "Need help?" access to our support teams on every page (below the content on-page) for admin users
• Where appropriate, dropdowns throughout Sapling automatically order items in alphanumeric order
• View holidays on the Calendar
• Ability to right-click to open another page, user profile, etc. into a new tab
• Full front-end upgrade from Angular to React leveraging our own Kallidus Design System

Workflows, Documents, or Outbox

• Emoji support throughout tasks, emails, and the calendar
• Workflow tasks are now ordered on a loose chronological order relative to when the workflow is assigned
• Attach more document types to workflow tasks (now including .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .doc, .docx, .ppt, .xls, .xlsx, .pdf, .txt, .zip, .csv, .pptx)
• The number of days, weeks, months, or years used for relative dating on workflow tasks now accepts any positive integer (previously limited, for example up to "2 years")
•  Assign workflow tasks relative to when other dependent tasks in the workflow are completed
•  Assign workflow tasks relative to the due date of the task
•  Set the due date of a workflow task relative to the date that task is assigned
•  Assign workflow tasks relative to the effective date of Role Changes (changes in the core Job Details tables)
• Assign relative-dated workflow tasks based on months before/after a key date (in addition to days, weeks, and years)
• Prevent workflow tasks with subtasks from being completed unless all subtasks are completed
• Support video embedding in Outbox email templates
• Specify sending time for Outbox email templates using "relative to key date" settings
• Schedule Outbox email templates based on locations and timezones

Integrations

• Enable multiple simultaneous payroll integrations
• Filter which employees are sent to various payroll integrations based on Location, Department, or Employment Status
• Receive notifications 14 days and 7 days before an API key is set to expire
• Automatically reset the 90 day expiration on API keys with every call
• Designate a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) location to deliver scheduled reports (in addition to delivery to individuals or permission groups over email) for additional integrations
• Integrate Sapling with your Culture Amp account through an SFTP data sync

Other admin tools

• Improved formatting for values, gallery photos, and more on the Company > About page (aligned with the Preboarding experience as well)
• Less-cluttered Dashboard
• Year included with Start Date / Key Date / Last Day on Dashboard
•  Redesigned Groups page for easier group management including Group Filters for organizing data throughout Sapling
• Smart Assignment 2.0 cuts half the time out of launching an onboarding or offboarding program based on up to five custom filters for profile templates, workflows, documents, and emails
•  Upload holidays in bulk for new groups or new calendar years under Administration Tools > Platform settings > Upload data
•  Include holidays in calendar feeds for external calendaring tools
• Filter calendar feeds to specific locations, departments or employment statuses
•  Apply holidays to specific locations (or department or employment status)
• Display pending time off requests on the Calendar alongside approved time off requests
• Filter Overview and Turnover reports based on Employment Status (among other fields)
• Reports can be scheduled for generation and delivery on a daily basis (in addition to weekly, every 2 weeks, twice a month, or monthly)
• When a data upload completes with some data not uploaded, the user receives a notification that contains a file of non-uploaded data that includes a column explaining why each row could not be updated; these errors could be corrected and then the file immediately re-uploaded
• Approval chains available to configure on Profile tab tables for notifications or review when data changed
• Time Off policies now sort alphabetically when making time off requests (use an alphanumeric prefix on policy names to set a custom sort order)

Managing team member data

• All employee profile picture/name elements are clickable links to the user profile
• Help text on Profile tab fields appears right beneath the field name
• Initiate role changes for a user to package role information, status, and compensation changes into a single event for promotions, transfer, relocations, or other similar internal moves
• Assign documents for completion from a user profile regardless of their current stage or the document type
• Automatically cancel all currently assigned and to-be-assigned tasks relating to an offboarded team member unrelated to their offboarding