Over the last 6 or so months a lot has happened in the Nintex Mobile Enterprise space. Now whether you own Nintex Forms Enterprise or you have usage rights to Nintex Mobile Enterprise, we have made App building really easy. Where a bit more thought comes into it, is the deployment piece.
If you were lucky enough to get along to the session at InspireX byTim Walwyn and yours truly, Tim went into a bit of detail on how to deploy Nintex Mobile using Intune while I spoke briefly on how you can build your app, and send out an email to your users to install from.
Well, as I partied up in Las Vegas the team in Melbourne has been hard at it, building out more functionality to make deploying the apps as easy as it is to build them. So with that lets take a look at what is now available.
If you aren't using an MDM, you can use the built in App deployment options. Firstly you want to create a 'Distribution list'
Create your distribution list, to make this easy you can just take a big copy of emails and just paste them in. The emails will get broken down and added automagically to the list. This is all committed at run time so no need to save.
Browse back to the home page to now either build out your app , or to apply the distribution list to an App you have already built.
While we are looking at the above image, there are quite a few new bits that are associated with the new functionality. Firstly the 'Auto Deploy' option. This will automatically send an email to the distribution list, with links to the installers whenever a new version of the App is created. This can be done 2 ways. Firstly when the administrator / App creator changes some settings and republishes the apps, or when Nintex pushes out a new code base for the Mobile App (e.g. a new feature like signature control, a new field type etc.). The auto deploy can obviously be turned off should you want to have a little more control. This is where the 'Send email to lists now' button comes into play. Hitting the 'Preview email' link will send the email to just the person who is logged in.
The email goes out to the users and they go ahead and install on their device.. The experience goes a little like this:
On my Android device, I get the following email:
Selecting the Android link, a webpage appears with a link to the app and some instructions on how to get it installed.
Upon selecting 'Download app' the APK file downloads and I can go ahead an install it
All done!
Now to see some utilization I can now go back to my portal and check to see if the App is being downloaded.
Going in deeper, I can go into the report to see which users have downloaded the app, and what versions of the app they have.
I'm pretty pumped with this release, as this update brings in some pretty powerful admin functions to make that whole deployment piece that much easier, but also gives the admin good insight into what version and users have downloaded.
As with all our products, we are keen for your ideas. If you like where this is going and have some ideas for even better features for app deployment or Nintex Mobile in general head over to http://nintex.uservoice.com and get them registered..
Until next time.
