2373837 - Manually importing courses from Skillsoft via SF SFTP

When you encounter issues extracting course data from Skillsoft servers, via a Web Services call, this KBA details a temporary and manual workaround until a more permanent solution is found.

SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS)

1. Create courses via Skillsoft
2. Set-up Skillsoft Connector in LMS
3. Run Skillsoft Connector
4. Error with extracting file from Skillsoft Servers via Web Services call

If there is an issue retrieving data from Skillsoft via making a standard Web Services call - for example, a connection timeout or connection attempt refused - a temporary workaround would be to bypass the call made by Web Services and manually extract the files from the SFTP.

To acheive this, we need to do take the following steps:

1. Login to Skillsoft dashboard and download the following files:  customer_catalog_subjectarea_XXXcompany_suffixXXX.csv, customer_catalog_XXXcompany_suffixXXX.csv, entitlement_status_XXXcompany_suffixXXX.xml
2. Upload all three files to your LMS SF distributed SFTP folder as specified in your Connector Configuration file.
3. Change the following properties in the Connector Config as below:

skillsoftconnectors.input.file.location=FTP
skillsoft.subjectarea.connector.byPassWebservicesCall=Y
skillsoft.item.connector.byPassWebservicesCall=Y

    4. Run the Skillsoft Connector.

Other Scenarios

If there is only an issue extracting the Subject Area data from Skillsoft - and therefore only a need to manually import the subject area file via SFTP - you can continue to extract the catalog and entitlement status data by making the Web Services call. In this scenario you would need to set the properties up as follows, making sure the Subject Area file has been downloaded from Skillsoft and uploaded to the SFTP before running the connector as described above:

skillsoftconnectors.input.file.location=FTP
skillsoft.subjectarea.connector.byPassWebservicesCall=Y
skillsoft.item.connector.byPassWebservicesCall=N

Finally, if the error is only affecting the catalog or entitlement status files, we only need to import these files manually via SFTP and we can continue to extract Subject Area data from Skillsoft via Web Services:

skillsoftconnectors.input.file.location=FTP
skillsoft.subjectarea.connector.byPassWebservicesCall=N
skillsoft.item.connector.byPassWebservicesCall=Y

LMS; Connectors; Skillsoft Course; Skillsoft Connector; Web Services; Bypassing Web Services; SFTP; manually import; workaround; , KBA , LOD-SF-LMS-CON , Connectors , How To