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How do you control who is allowed to create forms and workflows? Do you allow all site owners to do their own or do you have a group that creates them for the entire organization?

I've seen both as a consultant. Site Owners in some places, or a defined group of designers in others. The decision comes down to Governance.

Though it is easy to begin creating workflows in Nintex for anyone, there are a few things to consider when designing. Use of History data, number of workflow running at once, database use, and many others. It can come down to many small decisions too. Such as, how many workflows to you envision will be created? If you think 50, or some imaginary number of significance, you may want to consider the side effects (like lists with 200,000 items because no management is considered for history data, or there was an endless loop).


Its different for different organizations. Ours is based on our governance document. You just don't want any user to have this capability. If they do something wrong, they can crash the servers.


I can't do it due to security.


I understand that completely!


Ingo Ehlers‌ I will try to post a governance blog or start a community conversation about it later this month. I think it is an important topic and is sometimes overlooked. But if I can forward to you a link to get a better understanding of some of the architecture, please review Defensive Workflow Design Part 1 - Workflow History Lists  and the related links. Especially part three of the series. It's no all about governance, but it is related.


This is a great topic and as Andrew said, it is often overlooked by many organizations.  Governance is about guidelines that do not restrict users, but enable them to be productive within boundaries. 

How you approach who can or cannot create workflows depends on the structure of the organization, the knowledge and experience level of the users, and the processes in place for day to day business operations.  While implementing technical controls such as only site owners can create workflows is a good idea, it is a bad governance policy if it creates a bottleneck of productivity for content owners waiting on a site owner to create a workflow for them.

I have often mentioned on here that people should be cognitive of creating technical solutions or trying to make Nintex and SharePoint do things to correct or create workarounds for broken business processes.  Its like putting a bandage on when you need surgery.  Governance is about creating policies and procedures that put the right mechanism in place whether it is operations, technical or managerial.  Nintex is just part of that equation, and a very vital part I may add.  The conversations should never start there though, or you will always find yourself implementing solutions that are governed by rules that simply don't fit and cannot be enforced.


Hey Andrew,

do you have created the governance blog?

I think this is a very important topic and many customes, partners etc are interested in.

Thanks so far.

Christof


Not yet! But thanks for the encouragement, i'm looking forward to starting soon!


I'm forcing that at our customers, too and i'm very interesting how you and other do the governance of the nintex products. please keep me up-to-date Andrew Glasser​.

I think this should be an own part of the comunity, or Emily Billing​?

Thanks so far.

Christof


Thank's Mohammed for sharing your experiences. happy.png


We have site owners for each dept. Those site owners have to go through specific SharePoint training. Workflow training isn't required.


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