What does the managed integration do?
This integration populates Tribal Habits with new and updated users from a custom report in BambooHR every four hours, allowing for almost real-time user sync.
New users are created in Tribal Habits
Updated users are updated in Tribal Habits
User data is populated (e.g. job title, location)
Manager data is populated (including email)
Inactive users are deactivated in Tribal Habits (daily)
What are the benefits of this managed integration?
Reduced administrative workload
First, this integration reduces the workload for your Tribal Habits administrators by automating user creation. New users will be automatically populated in Tribal Habits from BambooHR. Users can also be deactivated based on data from BambooHR.
Data consistency
Second, the integration eliminates data inconsistency. Users are updated automatically from BambooHR, ensuring that your Tribal Habits data matches your BambooHR data. This allows your organisation to use BambooHR as a single source of truth for user data.
Improved reporting
With more (and more accurate) user data, your Tribal Habits reporting and administration is also improved.
What’s required to set up the integration?
The integration is managed by Tribal Habits. Our team will set up the integration and manage it on your behalf. Error messaging for a failed user sync can be enabled and sent to a specified email address at your organisation, allowing your BambooHR or Tribal Habits administrators to be immediately notified if user data is incorrect or inconsistent.
The integration requires minimal set-up by your BambooHR administrators, primarily the set-up of two Custom Reports of users to be synced into Tribal Habits - one for active users (synced every four hours during week days) and one for inactive users (synced once daily). Once the integration is ready, we will require a small amount of time from your BambooHR or Tribal Habits administrators to finalise testing.
What is the integration process?
Our integration with BambooHR is a ‘managed integration’. This means our our Support team will create and run the integration on your organisation’s behalf. It also means that each integration can be slightly customise to suit your organisation. Here are the major steps and options as we set-up this integration.
1 – Kick-Off Call
We begin with 30 minute kick-off call with your team to discuss any modifications from our standard integration.
This focuses on the additional fields of user data you may want to sync from BambooHR into custom fields in Tribal Habits – such as location or job title.
As this integration uses a Custom Report from BambooHR, which is set up by your organisation, we review this process (see below for details).
Finally, we also review your use of Single-Sign-On to ensure an integration with BambooHR is compatible with data from your SSO environment.
2 – Integration Preparation
The integration now requires a small amount of preparation by your organisation and then by our team. Your team needs to do three things.
A - API Key
First, we need an API key from BambooHR. As API Keys in BambooHR as assigned to specific users, we strongly recommend creating a 'Service User' in BambooHR to create your API key.
As Service User is a specific account used to host your API keys. If your API keys are created by a general employee, and that employee leaves your organisation and you delete their account in BambooHR, this may also delete the API key used in this integration (and therefore break the integration).
By using a Service User, you can avoid API keys being tied to any one employee. However, this is just a recommendation and you can certainly use any existing employee.
With your selected user, log into BambooHR and click on the name of the user on the top right corner. Then click on API Keys in the drop down menu.
Next, on the My API Keys page, click Add New Key and name it Tribal Habits LMS.
Next, when you generate your API Key you will be shown the key. IMPORTANT - This is the only time you can see the key in BambooHR. So immediately copy this key and save it somewhere secure. Our Support Team will need that key from you later.
B - Two Custom Reports
Our integration will be syncing two 'groups' of users from BambooHR, which we will obtain from Custom Reports you create in BambooHR.
All Active Employees. This group represents the users you want synced into Tribal Habits (and the data included in the sync). You can set up this report to sync all users in BambooHR or just a filtered set of users (e.g. only employees, but not volunteers).
Recently Inactive Employees. This group represents the users we should deactivate in Tribal Habits...as they have become inactive in BambooHR (which typically means they are no longer employed).
Custom Reports are created under Reports / My Reports. Once again, creating these Custom Reports by using a Service User is recommended (so that these reports are not deleted when an employee is removed from your organisation).
First, create a custom report for All Active Employees. This is the list of active users which we will sync into Tribal Habits. You can create this group of users in a very specific way, including adding various filters to only sync a specific group of people within their BambooHR environment (e.g. just users in Australia).
Create a report called Tribal Habits LMS - All Active Employees
Add the required fields to the report. Most likely First Name, Last Name, Work Email and then any additional employee profile information to be synced to Custom Fields in Tribal Habits (e.g. Team, Location, Role - whatever you want to sync).
THEN search for the field "Supervisor Email" and add that (this field is often hidden in BambooHR but searching for it usually reveals it - see image below).
THEN search for the field Status and add that as well (just to be safe).
Finally, add a Filter and filter for "Status is Active" (see image below).
Save the report and confirm it has the right people in it. This should be a list of your desired users to sync, all of whom are active and with columns of their required data.
If you have selected additional user data to sync to Tribal Habits, you also need to set up your Custom Fields in Tribal Habits to store the selected data from your report. We have default fields for first name, last name, email and supervisor email. So this is just about the 'extra' fields like Team, Location or Role. To sync this data, your Tribal Habits portal must have a Custom Field to store that data.
For example, you have a Location field in BambooHR and want to sync that data. So you need to create a Location custom field in Tribal Habits. That custom field could be Text (so it will accept any data) or List (in which can you need to create the list of items in Tribal Habits which matches all the possible locations stored in BambooHR).
Second, create a custom report for Recently Inactive Employees - employees who have left your organisation and should be deactivated in Tribal Habits. As BambooHR does not support webhooks (which would notify us each time someone leaves your organisation), we need to use a second report to manage this process. This report will be a list of people deactivated in BambooHR in the last four days.
So now we create a new report called Tribal Habits LMS - Recently Inactive Employees.
We only need first name, last name and work email.
We can update the filters to have Status is not active and Last changed is during the last 4 days (see images below).
Once again, check the filter is working (remembering to choose Inactive from the drop down when viewing the list of people in the report - since it will only show Active by default but there are no active people in this list).
C - Custom Report ID numbers
Now we need the ID numbers of each report. To obtain, click on each report and obtain the last number in the URL. For example, the ID number for this report is 100.
3 - Set Up Call
Once your team has completed the above tasks, please contact us to organise a second call with your team to finish the integration (or use the link provided to you after your initial integration meeting). We will then prepare the integration framework for the call.
On this call, we will need:
BambooHR URL (*.bamboohr.com)
API Key
Custom Report ID numbers for both reports
On this call we will set up the integration and test it to ensure all data is looking good. We can then run the integration manually to verify data consistency. At the end of this call, your integration will be live.😀
We actively monitor your integration for the first few weeks to ensure its all working as intended, or to fine tune any requirements. Your integration is then all set!