Zero
Custom Code Required
SSO
Single Sign-On
2
Platforms Unified
Workday customers needed a way to capture, index, search, view, and manage content directly from their Workday screens — without custom development or middleware.
Documents lived in silos. HR and Finance teams toggled between systems. Content governance was fragmented. Hyland partnered with Workday to change that.
The Challenge
Enterprise HR and Finance teams run on Workday — but the documents that support their work lived somewhere else entirely. Onboarding packets, invoices, benefits forms, compliance records. Every time a user needed to reference a document, they left Workday, opened another system, searched, found (or didn’t find) what they needed, and came back. Context switching wasn’t a minor inconvenience — it was the job.
Content governance was fragmented as a result. Documents uploaded in one system weren’t indexed against the right Workday records. Audit trails were split across platforms. Retention policies couldn’t be applied consistently because no single system had the full picture.
Previous attempts at solving this had layered on middleware, custom connectors, and bespoke development that required ongoing maintenance and created new failure points. The solution wasn’t more glue code. The solution was to close the gap entirely.
The Goal
Enable Workday users to capture, index, search, view, and manage Hyland-hosted content directly within the Workday interface — without ever leaving the platform. No middleware. No custom code. No separate login.
Single sign-on was a non-negotiable. Users authenticated once through Workday and gained seamless access to their content in Hyland. The integration had to feel like a native Workday capability — not a third-party tool bolted on the side.
The target was an experience so cohesive that users wouldn’t think of it as an integration at all. Content management would simply be part of how Workday worked for them.
The Approach
Design started with zero context switching as the hard constraint. If a user had to open a new tab, navigate to a separate URL, or authenticate again, the integration had failed. Every design decision was tested against that standard. The Workday UI patterns, interaction models, and visual language became the reference — not Hyland’s own interface.
On the configuration side, the goal was admin-friendly setup with no developer involvement. Hyland’s admin tooling was extended to let IT teams map content types, define indexing fields, and configure which Workday business objects would surface related documents — all through a point-and-click interface. Implementation time dropped from weeks of custom development to hours of configuration.
The architecture was designed to be AI-ready from the start. Content indexed through the integration would be available to future intelligent document processing and classification workflows without requiring a rebuild of the integration layer.
Content management, embedded in the flow of work
Results
Hyland and Workday customers gained a unified platform where content lives alongside the business records it supports. HR teams onboard employees without leaving Workday. Finance teams process invoices with supporting documents surfaced inline. Compliance teams run audits against a single, consistent content trail.
Context switching was eliminated for day-to-day content tasks. The SSO architecture meant zero additional credentials to manage. Configuration — not custom code — became the deployment model, which compressed implementation timelines and reduced reliance on specialized development resources.
The integration architecture also positioned both platforms for AI-powered document intelligence — content properly indexed within a governed, accessible system is the prerequisite for automation that actually works.
The best integration is one users forget is there. It just works.