Do drop bears exist?

NO.. Of course not, that is just something Australian’s tell tourists   But can you query the SharePoint Online User Profile service from Nintex O365 ? Well YES, yes you can..

This month’s drop of O365 actions from the team at Nintex looks a little like this:

• Query User Profile
• Terminate Workflow
• End Workflow

Hazzah I hear you say. Yup, I’m pretty happy as well.

For those of you still scratching head trying to think of the significance of this Nintex O365 drop, let me break it down.

Query User Profile

You have an internal purchase order workflow, and to make it as seamless as possible, you can now use the Query User Profile service to lookup the Initiators address / office location via the profile rather than having it to manually entered. But one of the most probable scenarios is that you want to assign a task to the initiators Manager seamlessly. Without the need to ask or to do any other type of lookup or master list of line managers etc.

Terminate Workflow Instances

The new Azure Workflow Manager doesn't provide the ability to cancel workflows unlike its forebear Windows Workflow Foundation. So the team have built the capability for you. The Terminate Workflow Instances action allows the designer to build in logic to end workflows during the running of another workflow. For example: you need to run a maintenance workflow over all the items in the list and to do this you want to be able to cancel all workflows running on the item, make some changes and then restart the workflow. This action in short, allows you to cancel workflows other than itself.

Terminate Current Workflow

The Terminate Current Workflow action, whilst similar to the Terminate Workflow Instances action, allows the designer to stop the current workflow. Why would you do this, you may ask ?… Well it is simple really. Let’s say you have a workflow that requires approval from finance as one of the steps. On approval it carries on to other approvals and changes. With a reject outcome however, the workflow just needs to send a notification and end. Now you could argue that you could build this into the logic of the workflow to allow it to end gracefully. This would also require you to use a state machine or some other branching / conditional logic to appropriately route the workflow top the end of the flow. This action allows you to simply just end the workflow in its tracks, avoiding in some cases unnecessary over engineering

So 3 new actions to get your head around as they pack a punch and deliver some fantastic functionality to the toolkit..

Enjoy