Studio, Orchestrate and the browser: where Workday integration development is heading

For most of the last decade, if a Workday integration was too complex for an EIB or a Core Connector, the answer was Workday Studio. That answer is changing. Below are the questions I get asked most about Workday Orchestrate, followed by a walkthrough of a small orchestration I recently built that pulls daily exchange rates from the Reserve Bank of Australia into Workday.

What is Workday Orchestrate?

Workday Orchestrate is Workday’s low-code tool for building integrations and automations. You design an orchestration on a visual canvas in your browser, one step at a time: call an API, transform the response, branch on a condition, loop over records, log what happened, handle the errors. No local IDE, no Eclipse workspace, no Java.

It arrived in 2021 as part of Workday Extend, where it drove the logic behind custom apps. With 2025R1 it was brought into the Integration Cloud, so integration developers can use it without an Extend subscription. That move is what put it in front of most integration teams.

There are now two flavours:

• Orchestrate for Integrations is built for integration systems. It adds steps that Extend doesn’t have: sending RaaS requests, triggering business processes, triggering other integrations and generating PDFs.

• Orchestrate for Extend sits behind Extend apps, supports synchronous and asynchronous calls, and includes some AWS components that aren’t available to integrations.

What can it actually do?

• Call Workday APIs: SOAP web services, REST, RaaS and WQL

• Call external systems over HTTP and SFTP

• Run on a schedule, launch from a business process, or be called by a third-party system through an inbound API

• Validate, branch, loop and transform JSON and XML using expressions rather than XSLT

• Break larger flows into reusable sub-orchestrations

• Log and handle errors, with run history on the Developer Site and an integration event in the tenant

Everything is built and managed on the Workday Developer Site (developer.workday.com). You create an integration app there, build the orchestration, then link it to an integration system in your tenant using the Orchestrate Integration Template. From the tenant’s side it behaves like any other integration system. You schedule it, secure it and monitor its events the same way.

Where does it fall short?

It isn’t built for heavy batch. Workday’s own training positions it for transactional processing, not large batch jobs. If you’re loading hundreds of thousands of journal lines or a full payroll input file, Studio is still the better fit.

It’s low-code, not no-code. You still need to understand the APIs, the payload shapes and the expression language. Developers coming from Studio also have some habits to unlearn: XSLT and MVEL give way to a shorter, more compact expression style, and the instinct to reach for a custom Java step has nowhere to go.

So is Studio going away?

Not tomorrow. Existing Studio integrations remain supported. But the direction is clear. Workday’s Orchestrate training now tells developers to treat Orchestrate as the main tool in the integrations landscape and to use Studio only for complex or specialised requirements. DevCon 2025 ran sessions on migrating Studio integrations to Orchestrate and on taking an Orchestrate-first approach.

The bigger shift is where Studio itself lives. At DevCon 2026, Workday previewed Studio Builder, a browser-based tool on the Developer Site for maintaining existing Studio integrations, including ones that rely on custom code. It sits behind the same Developer Site login as Orchestrate, lets you edit assemblies in the browser without installing and configuring Eclipse, and supports moving assemblies from the original Integration Runtime (IR1) to the newer IR2. Workday was clear that the DevCon version was a work in progress, so expect it to change before it lands broadly.

Add the Developer Agent announced at the same event, which lets developers build on Workday in plain language from tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and the Developer Site is becoming the single front door for building on Workday.

My read of how this plays out:

1. New builds default to Orchestrate, unless volume or complexity rules it out.

2. Existing Studio integrations move off the desktop and onto the Developer Site through Studio Builder, and from IR1 onto IR2.

3. Studio assemblies get rebuilt as orchestrations when they next come up for meaningful change, as Orchestrate keeps picking up capability.

Eclipse-based Studio will be around for a while, at least for as long as a migration to cloud takes. The day-to-day work of building and maintaining Workday integrations is moving into the browser.

What should integration teams do now?

• Inventory your Studio estate. Tag each integration by volume, complexity and whether it uses custom code. The small API-to-API ones are your first migration candidates.

• Build your next small integration in Orchestrate. Pick something low-risk with a clear source and target.

• Get the Developer Site sorted. Tenant access, app promotion and who owns what. This becomes the place integration work happens.

A worked example: daily RBA exchange rates into Workday

Workday Financials needs currency conversion rates to translate foreign currency transactions. In plenty of tenants those rates are keyed in by hand or loaded from a spreadsheet each week. Neither ages well.

The source. I looked at a few commercial rate feeds before settling on the Reserve Bank of Australia. The RBA publishes exchange rates for around 20 currencies against the Australian dollar, every business day, at around 4pm Sydney time, and makes them available as an RSS feed. It’s authoritative, free, and the number Australian finance teams already reference. As with any public source, read the publisher’s terms of use before you automate against it.

Why Orchestrate. I originally designed this one in Studio. Then I looked at the shape of it: one small XML feed, one Workday web service, a couple of dozen records a day. That’s the exact profile Orchestrate was made for, so I rebuilt the design there.

The flow.

1. Schedule. The integration system runs daily at 5pm Adelaide time, comfortably after the RBA publishes.

2. Fetch. An HTTP step calls the RBA exchange rate RSS feed.

3. Parse. Each item in the feed carries a currency, a value and a date. The orchestration pulls out the currency code, rate and effective date for each one.

4. Check. Confirm the effective date is today. If the RBA didn’t publish, log it and finish cleanly rather than erroring or re-posting yesterday’s rates.

5. Filter and map. Keep only the currencies the tenant actually uses, and map each one to its Workday currency reference and rate type.

6. Post. Load each rate through Workday’s currency conversion rate web service.

7. Log. Write a summary of what loaded and what was skipped, visible in the Developer Site run history and on the integration event.

Field notes from the build.

• Watch the direction of the rate. The RBA quotes one Australian dollar in units of the foreign currency. Make sure the from and to currencies you post match that, and agree with finance whether the inverse is loaded too or derived.

• It’s NSW holidays that count. The RBA doesn’t publish on public and bank holidays observed in New South Wales. If you’re in another state, your local public holidays won’t line up, so the ‘no new rates today’ path will run on days you’re working, and won’t run on some days you’re not.

• Agree the rate type up front. Decide which Workday rate type these rates land as before the first load, not after finance spots them in a report.

• Keep the logging human-readable. The first person to look at a failed run will probably be someone in finance, not the developer.

The RBA build is deliberately small. It replaces a manual task, runs in a few steps, and anyone with access to the Developer Site can open it in a browser and follow what it does. It’s the kind of integration Studio was always overkill for, and the kind of work most Studio estates are full of.

If you’d like to know more about the RBA exchange rate orchestration or how it could work in your Workday tenant, get in touch. I’m happy to walk you through the build.