Question

My company needs to migrate data from a Taleo system to a new HR system.

A little research suggests that traditional ETL may not work against the Taleo cloud based system, but I don’t know enough about the setup and am trying to learn.

Does anyone have experience migrating HR data from Taleo to another system, and, if so, how did you do it, and was traditional ETL an option?

Thanks

Answer 1

How you access Taleo depends as much on your platform as theirs.

Example: I’m using Windows:
not sure if this is my mistake ~~ vs2010 Add Service Reference fails

Taleo has just released a new version that as has killed a number of companies temporarily.*

Whether your ETL is one time or continous, Taleo provides a .PDF version of their API that works as follows for employee records (I’m only grabbing their employee records). Other records appear to use the same paradigm.

Employee records have two types of fields: fixed and user defined. The fixed fields which I work with in c# are like simple properties of a class and can be accessed with standard .name notation such as taleoItem.ManagerId. The user defined names are in list of “beans” … for each bean, one looks first at its name ( *foreach (var taleoItem in taleoEmployeeBean.flexValues) … if (taleoItem.fieldName == “Social Club Member”) { … ). * currently I’m getting zero of the 50+ flexbeans that I normally get and two flexbeans that I’ve never before seen. as can be expected, until Taleo fixes this breakage, all that I can to is twiddle my thumbs

When Taleo works properly, retrieving data generally works like this.

1. access a fixed url to get a url for your company;

2. authenticate via the url retrieved from step 1 to get a session token.

3. use the session token from step 2 to invoke the various Taleo API methods.

Warning: the Taleo API has documentation errors. Also, the test cases will not necessarily work.