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Given the current global climate, Microsoft said in March that Teams usage had grown to 44 million daily active users. It’s now jumped another 70 percent - during one of their latest investor calls, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Teams usage has increased to more than 75 million daily active users. Its evident Teams has become the enterprise collaboration hub for teamwork, with organisations seeing the benefits of Teams, some of which includes: Chat-based communication instead of email Channels instead of folders Workspaces allowing you to securely edit files at the same time. The liking of content, @mentions and replies.  But with all good things, comes a great level of risk – with Teams, it’s the management and governance controls which become the biggest hurdle. There are various ways for a user to create a team, and as such, these are some of the pitfalls: Teams and Site sprawl Potential Data loss Permission issues Organisations should think of ways to manage their Team

Nintex Forms allows for Cascading Drop Downs which can improve the functionality of your forms, but what if you wanted to include a third-tier to the cascading drop down? Let's take a look at how to configure a three-tier cascading drop down using Nintex Forms! The Setup For this example, we are creating, in total, four lists (List A, List B, List C, and Meal Order). Below is what List A -  C look like: List Configuration  Notice the following: List A contains the Single Line column 'Title' data that will feed into the 'Meal Time' List Lookup used on List B. List B contains the List Lookup column, 'Meal Time' (from List A), and a Single Line column, 'Meal Type'. List C contains the List Lookup column, 'Meal Type' (from List B), and a Single Line column, 'Beverage'. These are the columns used when creating the list, 'Meal Order', which will be where we build our Nintex Form. Below is the configuration of the 'Meal Order' list columns: Meal Order - Col

Welcome to the first blog of my new series!Nintex vTE Giving back to the Community:  Getting Started with Nintex Forms As a Nintex vTE I’m approached daily by colleagues and customers making requests of me to come up with creative and efficient solutions for some super complex business problems.  This blog isn’t about any of that though.  Rather, its purpose is to help those of you who may be new and perhaps struggling to get started.  It’s my intention to save you time by avoiding some common pitfalls, while teaching you some of the basics.  Moreover, it’s about giving back to the Community.  Join me now as we explore Nintex Forms. Assumptions:  Nintex forms is already installed; User possesses general SharePoint knowledge. Intended Audience:  Someone new to Nintex Forms.  Although the examples in this tutorial were done in on-prem, O365 will be very similar. Level:  BeginnerVersion Information:  Sharepoint 2013 (On-prem), Nintex Forms Version: 2.9.4.0 You’ve just received word that N

Hi! One of the nice features of Nintex forms is an ability to create a repeating section within a single form. This allows you to add multiple lines of something, IE sales and then tally the rows up.  One of the problems is easily reporting on this row data. If you export to Excel you just get the ‘Rows’ within the form in a single field as XML. I wanted to create an excel report that split out these xml fields into individual rows and be refreshable. Power Query to the rescue with a bit of help from my power query guru. The following is a guide on splitting that data into individual rows using excel and power query and connecting directly to the Sharepoint list to create a refreshable report. WHAT YOU NEEDFirst off you need your sharepoint list and make sure your repeating section is connected to a multiple line field to capture the XML. All of the fields you’ve added in the repeating section should be named. You will then need Excel 2013 onwards with the latest version of PowerQuery.

I was recently asked how to calculate business days within a Nintex Form.  Here is a video on how I achieved a result, but this is just a quick example and still requires thorough testing to see if it meets your business requirements.  Here is the function:  ifElse ( /* IF MORE THAN 1 WEEK DIFFERENCE */ dateDiff("TotalWeeks",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) != 0, /* SUBTRACT 2 DAYS PER WEEK FOR WEEKENDS */ (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1) - (2 * dateDiff("TotalWeeks",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date])), ifElse ( /* SUBTRACT 2 DAYS */ (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1 >= 7) || (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1 >= 6 && formatDate([Form].[Start date],"dddd") == "Tuesday") || (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1 >= 5 && formatDate([Form].[Start date],"dddd") == "Wednesday") || (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date

Excerpt from: Words and categories matter in process management My guess is that you have heard the axiom: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” If there were a process management equivalent, it would go something like this: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words used without proper definitions will derail my process management implementation.” Ok, so maybe this version does not exactly roll off the tongue, but I promise you there is a point. Imagine you are working to embed process management as a discipline into your business. What are you, primarily at least, seeking to manage by doing this? Is it fair to say you are primarily seeking to manage processes? If so, then the primary scope of the implementation effort must be centered on managing processes – not on managing other types of business information (ie: policy, guides, forms, training, etc.). This means the technology you use, methods you employ, and stakeholders you engage must be foc

PD 20.9.0 pushes the limit of data processing, significantly reducing the time it takes to find a process. We have wrapped it with an exciting new user interface, so that business analysts can now explore, analyze, and map processes for automation, with no effort. WHAT IS INCLUDED? A NEW WAY TO DISCOVER PROCESSESThe ‘Discovery’ experience is quicker and easier.The new discovery page runs the discovery algorithm in real-time and lets you quickly review the findings.Spotted a meaningful process? Save it to the Process Library for further analysis. VIDEO PREVIEWSWe’ve added a video preview for every discovered process so you can watch a short simulation of how the process is done in real life by a user. BETTER STATISTICSAiding statistical information is now available for every discovered process: process duration, application used, mouse vs. keyboard distribution, and more. TAG PROCESSES BY "BUSINESS USE CASE"Just to make it easier for you to categorize and to scan through processes, we'v

Deprecate support for Internet Explorer 11 and support the new Microsoft Edge Microsoft has recently announced that their Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). In addition, with the release of the new Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and high user adoption of it since January, Microsoft will be ending support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app. The following are the key dates from Microsoft with regards to browser support:Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11. After March 9, 2021, the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app will not receive new security updates. Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11. As the Nintex (Forms and Workflow) for Office 365 offering integrates and leverages Microsoft 365, Nintex will follow suit and phase out support for Internet Explorer 11 and look to support the new Microsoft Edge. For Nintex (Forms and Work

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an encryption protocol that ensures privacy and data integrity of information passed between two communicating applications. It’s the most widely deployed security protocol in use today and is used for web browsers and other applications that require data to be securely exchanged over a network. TLS ensures that a connection to a remote endpoint is the intended endpoint through encryption and endpoint identity verification.   Nintex Live services uses TLS as a key component of its security and the current version supported is TLS 1.2. To ensure the industry security standards are met, the support of legacy TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will be removed as they no longer meet the security standards.  From December 1st 2020, Nintex will update the Live Router to remove support for Legacy Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0, 1.1. If any Nintex Live services are in use, you will be required to update your SharePoint deployment to support TLS 1.2 to ensure that the followi

Want to trigger Dynamic Documents to run based on a Condition in Salesforce? Of course you do! There are many ways to accomplish this. Let’s talk about doing it with Nintex Workflow Cloud or NWC. There are countless reasons and ways this could be done. BUT… Why do it with NWC? Salesforce has workflow solutions. How excited you are about my answer also depends on what you are trying to do. I’m not saying go replace everything with NWC when everything is already working. It's more an opportunity to enhance.  Simple use-case… Something happens in Salesforce and a Document is generated. NWC has no problem handling this. Neither does Salesforce. How about this… Something happens in Salesforce and based on a percentage calculation it has to go through an approval process. The approval process could have two to three approvers based on many parts of the data model. This approval needs to be handled via a form because there is additional content gathered beyond yes/no approve/decline. Once app

A common request over the years has been the ability to translate text into multiple different languages using a Nintex Worklfow. In this example, I've created a new Xtension that will interface with the Google Cloud Translate API, providing native translation services within your workflow. If you'd like to see a video walkthrough of this Xtension in action, please check out the embedded video below:  To download this Xtension or to get more details on how your Google Cloud account needs to be configured to use this Xtension, please check out the page for this Xtension on the Nintex Process Accelerator Gallery. For this example, I'll be running through a baseline request where we're translating some text and sending it via email.  To start, I have configured my start event to be a form with two fields. 1) Translate Text (where the text I want to translate will be provided) and 2) an email (to send the recipient the translated text via email).   Next I'll configure the Translate Text ac

I wanted to put together this overview to help show case the number of new templates that have been added to the Nintex Process Accelerator Gallery (PAG) over the month of September. Because we did not have a "Month In Review" post last month I am also going to include some of the templates that were added in the last days of August to make sure that no one misses anything exciting! Some really great templates were added in September, so let's dig in! Process Maps (Promapp)Know Your Customer: Outlines the manual and automated steps for an organization to onboard and verify the identity of a new customer Emergency Risk Assessment: Identify and analyze potential hazards and their impact on the business in the event of an emergency Emergency Response Plan: A good emergency response plan keeps people safe and stabilizes incidents as effectively as possible Emergency Response - Evacuation: In the case of a fire or chemical event, an evacuation may be required Emergency Response - Shelter: I

Excerpt from: The elusiveness of operational excellence Doubtless you have heard the term “operational excellence” used before, perhaps even in your own organization. It seems that many businesses want to be operationally excellent – after all, who would not want that? I cannot say I have ever met an organization who wanted to be operationally average. But often those desires go unfulfilled as organizations fail to make the necessary changes to transition from average to excellent. Last week I was presenting to a group on this very topic of operational excellence. I started by attempting to define the term which is harder than it may appear. As with so many business buzzwords, nailing down a precise definition proved a bit challenging. However, despite the existence of more definitions for “operational excellence” than Baskin-Robbins flavors (by my count they are up to 46), we can minimally agree that it involves maximizing the value your organization produces, while at the same time l

 Starting a Nintex Component Workflow from Microsoft Dynamics is made simple by Flow actions. You start this process by first copying the API URL from within Nintex Workflow Cloud.    Next you transition over to Micosoft Dynamics and choose to create a new Flow from the entity you wish to initiate the NWC call from.             This will route you to the Flow designer where you can add an "HTTP + Swagger" action. This is a premium dynamics action and may incur addition licensing cost.                   Within the "HTTP + Swagger" action, you can paste your API URL from NWC.               Pasting in this URL will automatically make your component workflow visible and create fields for the content needed in the body of the Http action. From here, you simply need to insert dynamic or static content into these fields so dynamics can forward this to the input variables for the component workflow.               Once you save this flow, you can run the http action directly from your dynamics

There are times when a user does not want to go through each and every email to approve a task. There are also times when a list item is deleted; however, the task is still out there for that item. To display the task list for users in SharePoint: Go to Lists->Workflow Tasks Click on the link Copy the URL Create a new item in the Quick Launch and paste the URL there Users can filter the list on their name or check on the status of other users To display one task link in Nintex email notifications:In your email notification, you can 'Insert Reference' and select 'Workflow Status URL' All the user will have to do is click on 'Respond to Task' Personally, I give all the users the information they need in the email to approve/reject. In addition, I attach any files. That way they can perform a lazy approval if they so choose to. Where I work, the URLs are disabled from clicking on them. So users have to copy and paste them to open their items. If you have an orphaned task, it will appea

2020 saw the release of the Microsoft Lists app for Office 365. The app allows you to create a list from scratch, import from Excel or a template to track and organise information to share with your company or teams. Not radically different from the concepts which underpin SharePoint lists behaviour, now in a slightly decoupled app experience. So.... Does Nintex support Microsoft Lists? Let’s take a look…. First I’ll need to create a list. Access the Office 365 app launcher or waffle and select Lists. Create a Blank List or create a list from a template or existing list. Or Import from Excel. I’m going to create a list to track Assets in my organisation and their condition. Take note of the Site Url that the List is saved to, we’ll need this later in Nintex Workflow Cloud.At this point you’ll be able to see the Nintex Forms for Office 365 and Nintex Workflow for Office 365 apps in the List ribbon… that means I can create a New Item form for the list using Nintex and a workflow to autom

I recently was asked how can a designer change the look of a form based on the user who is accessing the form when using Nintex New Responsive Forms for Office365. To explain how I would do this with the video below.  Cheers,Euan

IntroductionLists are a great tool to utilize while building out your botflows. They can help simplify complex logic, serve as a data source or as a quick lookup to help translate values.  While we have a lot of great documentation on the actions themselves, I thought it would be very helpful to put together a reference on how to get the most out of Lists in Nintex RPA. For the sake of length, I’ll split this up into a series. I’ve published one a little out of order in Creating Randomized Data with Nintex RPA, which really should have been published after this one. This blog will serve as an introduction, with either one or two follow ups to cover more in-depth utilization of Lists. Creating a List“Sounds like Lists are great, and they can do a lot, but how do I actually USE one?” you might be asking. Well, for starters you’ve got to actually have a List made before we can reference it. Now, there are quite a few ways to create a List, so let’s break each of them down. ManuallyMake a

Hello all, One of the most regular workflow designs I see with all lines of business is the use of multiple approvals are repeating the same actions but with only minor differences each time. Currently it seems the preferred method to solve such workflows will be to use State machines to build branches for each step, Although this works and is fairly straight forward to pull off, I believe it has some minor drawbacks in some situations and in some extreme cases in the cloud, may cause bad workflow performance and throttling. The kind of state machine I am talking about may look a little like the below but can be much bigger.             I regularly see state machines where at first they were made to only suit 3-4 approvals which is perfectly fine and exactly how you should use the state machine, however over time processes grow, more and more is added in and eventually you may find instead of having 4 branches, you now have 2 state machines each with 27 branches yes this is a real worl

Do you have a need to automate some telephony using Nintex Workflow? This could include sending text message reminders or notifications, or making voice calls where your workflow can notify a person of an upcoming event, a reminder of an appointment or that a package is ready to be picked up. Nintex Workflow can be used to perform these functions via third party integration, such as communicating to Twilio.  You can read more about what Twilio offers on their site.  If you want to try this out, Twilio allows you to sign up for a trial account to make sure you can get this working from your workflow. This post will be about how to get Nintex Workflow to send messages to Twilio so that it can send a text message to the destination on your behalf. Requirements Firstly, you will need an account at Twilio.  Part of that, is that you will get AccountSid and an API Authentication Token.  These are required for successful requests to be sent to Twilio. There is also an important part of sendin

Excerpt from: To automate, or not to automate, that is the question To automate, or not to automate, that is the question.It is not uncommon for organizations riding the digital transformation wave to answer the question above with a resounding: "TO AUTOMATE!"To that, I reply: "To automate what, exactly?"As a reminder, process management is the practice of improving company performance through managing and optimizing business processes. Automation is a tactic for process optimization and logically follows initial process documentation and management. Flipping the order - or ignoring process documentation entirely - will lead to frustration. See full post here: To automate, or not to automate, that is the question

To support the growing number of people managing their processes using Nintex Promapp, we are upgrading the infrastructure that hosts your site.Starting in July 2020, we will be upgrading customers to the new infrastructure, which includes a switch to Microsoft Azure as our cloud infrastructure provider.Why are we upgrading?We are upgrading our platform to align our security controls across the organization and provide a consistent access experience across platforms.Also, the upgrade will provide the key benefits listed below:Scale - Allowing us to scale more effectively by using more PaaS offerings. Security Monitoring - Nintex security log monitoring and infrastructure scanning. Shared Knowledge - Shared patterns, practices, and knowledge across the Nintex Production Operations team. Access Controls - Centralized management of users through integration with Nintex corporate directory and role based access control.What changes will I notice?The only thing you should notice will be a s

As part of obtaining a license for Nintex Workflow and Forms for Office 365 you (or your customer) will have to provide Nintex with the Office 365 tenant ID. There is two options to find the tenant ID:Run a PowerShell script Check within the Nintex appsOption 1 might be a bit too difficult unless you are happy to work with PowerShell AND have the appropriate permissions.Option 2 on the other hand is rather easy:If you haven't dont so already, install the Nintex Workflow app from the SharePoint App store Navigate to any list or library within the site you just installed the app in Click on "Nintex Workflow" within the "List Tab" in the ribbon bar The workflow designer will now open. Expand the drop-down under "Information" and select "About"     The next screen will provide you with the ID of your tenant.     For those of you who have access to Nintex Forms for Office 365, it works exactly the same way there.

Excerpt from: Detailed simplicity: a path to process engagement  What is detailed simplicity?Detailed simplicity is a method of organizing process information to maximize its readability and usefulness. In other words, it is a way to combat the all-too familiar spaghetti-style process maps or the seemingly endless standard operating procedure manuals (which are typically a mash-up of policy statements, process standards, and procedure information). Why push back against these traditional methods of sharing process information? Well, at the end of the day, they discourage engagement. This matters because organizations should desire to have their processes positively impact the way they deliver value. For this to happen, process doers must actually reference and follow company standards. If process standards are presented in ways that discourage engagement, then organizations can expect that process doers will avoid using those standards at all costs – even if that means longer processin

As our customers and partners continue to explore (xplore?) the wonderful world of the Nintex Xtensions framework, there are often questions about how to work/ interact with different components of a particular API. I'll be providing some additional examples of Xtensions over the next few blog posts that highlight how to accomplish different goals when building an Xtension, while hopefully also opening up some fun new options for actions within the tools!  In today's blog post, I am going to walk through how to configure an action that outputs to an audio file. I'll be using the WellSaidLabs text-to-speech rendering service for this example, as it does a good job highlighting a common use case from our customers (converting text to audio) while maintaining an API that is clearcut for the example.  I've provided a video walkthrough as well that can be seen below:  First to start, we will need to examine the API. Looking at the documentation, the output is set as audio/mpeg.   For this e