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Hi

 

I need some pointers for a company policy acknowledgment workflow. Would like to know if the scenario we have is possible to implement or if there are potential issues that others can forsee with what is possible in Nintex. I found some old posts on the subject but none had any solutions that I could get help from hence posting on this subject again.

 

System in use: Sharepoint 2013 on-premise, Nintex Workflow Enterprise, Nintex Forms Standard

 

Scenario: All company policies are located in a document library as Word/PDF documents. They have metadata such as Status (Current/Superseded), Date Last Reviewed, Date Superseded etc associated with them. Up till now these policies were merely advertised in the staff newsletter however the business would like to:

  • start sending policies to every staff member through nintex workflow+forms.
    • This can happen at the time a policy is modified, in which case an AD group containing all users would be used
    • Or when a new employee joins us, in which case just the employee's account will be added to policy
  • get staff to acknowledge they have read and agreed to the policy
  • place a copy of the policy as it was at that point (the footer would contain version control) with some sort of digital signature into the employee's personnel file (located in another site collection; URL of each personnel folder into which document needs to be copied can kind of be crafted based on each employee's first and last name)
  • automated reminder to staff if they haven't done this within a specified timeframe
  • run reports on which staff have acknowledged which policy and which haven't

 

Feedback/Guidance we need:

  • Should we use a to-do task instead of a  Flexitask or Approval Task because the only options those provide are: task finishes when first person responds; task finishes when majority respond - there seems to be no option for task does not finish till every last person responds. We don't want the task to end pre-maturely before all staff have acknowledged the policy
  • Can the to-do email notification task take the user to a link that leads to a customised form containing a link to the policy and a check box and button?
  • To-do tasks don't have branches like Flexi tasks and approval tasks so how can we added the additional step of copying the policy with some digital signature into the personnel file of the employee
  • Can we copy items from one site collection's doc lib to another's in a straightforward manner
  • What variable can we use to craft the personnel file URL into which the file needs to be copied. E.g. Initiator won't make sense as the Policy team will be the Initiator. Is there such a thing as current approver or current person assigned task as using their first and last name will craft the necessary URL into which to copy the document

 

Any tips or pointers from those more experienced with the system than us would be apreciated :)

 

Thanks

Parul

@stdc thanks for posting your question. As a newbie to Nintex, you're outlining a great process and heading in the right direction. May I suggest taking a look at Nintex Promapp. Not saying that what you want to achieve from an automation standpoint is not possible with Nintex, because it is. You can leave things in word/pdf documents and use workflows to route and approve them.



 



With Nintex you can use the Flexi-task to assign task to people or groups to review and use the configurations as needed for approvals. 



You can use workflows to copy or create new items in different sites as needed as well



 



I would recommend before going too far down this path that you evaluate moving your policies into Promapp. It  is a really good and easy to use tool that allows you to move that into an online text based system with roles, groups, variations, approvals and more all built in. The plus is that you can get user feedback easily, prompt for replies, and attach documents, etc all in one single place. This elevates the game of what you are trying to solve with both storing the policies themselves and having a good change management policy in place to manage them. Not selling you on it, again if SPS is what you are wanting to use then go for it and Nintex is the right tool for that.



 



Hope this helps you think through what you're doing. 

Hi @eharris04, thanks so much for your reply. I forgot to say our organisation does also have Promapp and I did come across a post on this forum that suggested Promapp as a potential solution.

However we did want to consider a SharePoint-only solution due to the potential need to manage the policy as a recordkeeping object in our organisation's EDRMS (electronic document and records management system) in order to implement requirements such as on-premise storage, automated retention & disposal along with other objects in the EDRMS, ability to maintain a static copy of the record as it was for that version (rather that evolving live document), ability for permission restrictions, ability to maintain a metadata profile over time, ability to export records and associated metadata for migration to another system, etc.

Regarding the suggestion to use flexi-task - what is holding us back is that the behaviour only contains the following options: first response applies, majority decide, majority choose a specific outcome, all must agree, all must agree on a specific outcome.

All these options make sense if our workflow was about getting the policy approved from a policy approval committee. We want our workflow to be acknowledged as "Read and Agreed" by our staff. So by that logic we don't want the task we send out to depend on the response - as in what one staff members decides or majority staff decide doesn't dictate the result of the workflow.

It shouldn't "end" because majority decided to agree... it should remain active or at least each individual task should remain active till a user chooses an outcome. Does sound like I need to create a FOR loop to traverse the AD group and assign a new flexi-task to each individual staff member rather than using the AD group itself in the "assignees" column. Is that a solution that would make sense in terms of how to use Nintex workflows?

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