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Panels.Panels never change. But what DOES change is who can see them, and when. This is what initiated my most recent client request: "Make sure that when the Manager goes into the form, that they can only see the Manager panel, and the Software panel - and not the other two."  "Simple!" I replied. Our panels are JavaScript controlled beauties; a sight to behold. Easy to hide using Nintex rules. I spoke too soon. "Also," they began, "Ensure that the Manager is taken directly to the Manager panel when they open their notification link." My endless Googling and Nintexoogling of "target panel" was fruitless; if nothing else, I hope this blog will cement the words "target panel" forever in the sea

Some of you may have noticed (if your device automatically updates your apps of course) that a new version of Nintex Mobile has been released. For those of you that haven't been automatically updated... what are you waiting for? Head over to your friendly neighborhood app store of choice and download the latest version of of Nintex Mobile now! So what exactly is so new and powerful about this latest release of Nintex Mobile anyhow? Well, here is a breakdown of the features for each version that was released: Nintex Mobile for iOS (Apple) v4.5 Nintex Mobile for Android (Samsung, et. al) v4.5 Nintex Mobile for Windows v4.4 Added support for Tasks in Nintex Workflow Cloud Added support for Tasks in Nintex Workflow Cloud

With InspireX nearly upon us, I spent some time yesterday looking over all of the sessions that are going on. There is a ton of cool content and session going on over the course of the conference, and I have to say, I feel like I am going to miss out on something! A big announcement or cool session that I just cannot make it to! I cannot be in more than one place no matter how much my wife tries to make me! So I got thinking, "how can I keep track of everything that is going on and get the cool, exciting news in real time?" TWITTER! Now am I not one for being glued to my phone and miss what is right in front of me, so how can I get the tweets I care and want to know about in a place that I can read through when I want. Then it dawned on me, why not use a FLOW! I can setup a Flow to search the "twitter-sphere" for #InspireX, #Nintex, and #NINx17 and create an item in a list within my tenant! So let's take a look at how incredibly easy this is to setup!

SharePoint is a great tool to collaborate and track document changes. But, have you ever had the requirement, that a form should be submitted "anonymously"?Some customers know the princip of inboxes, where you can place a complaint anonymously.Since this is a bit "not featured by design" in SharePoint, I would like to share my solution approach.(There are others, as you can read here: Anonymous Form Submission but in my case, I don't want to delete submitted items.) First, I create a new Site-Workflow.For this scenario, I need two variables. One is for the complaint-message and one is an optional textfield, where you could enter your name, if you like.(Please note: "Show on start form") Secondly, I edit the start form with Nintex Forms. The fields are connected to the corresponding var

I just wanted to take a minute an share a really simple solution that drove a lot of value within an organization. It is these simple processes that provide a big value and quick wins and a nice ROI to show the power of what Nintex can provide. You do not always have to tackle the most complex solutions to get a reward back. This company has a reward system for its employees. It was a paper process where users would go to a SharePoint Online document library, download a copy of a word document, fill it out and then email it to HR. This is done to keep the award nominations private. Not entering data twice, but still could be greatly improved. To streamline this process and still have a hard copy record we created a Custom SharePoint Online List. A Nintex Form which was also mobile, was created to make the UI better as well as push the from out to our users mobile devices.  Other than keeping this form fairly simple we did use a form redirect so then the u

There are different reasons for different IT teams to keep a version of the product unchanged for a length of time. When that length of time expands years it is natural to be cautious when it finally comes down to upgrading the product in your environment. Nintex designs are by their nature almost limitless, so how do we prepare for an update when we don't know what sort of impact it will or will not have on the production workflows. The simple answer is to test it. You will need to run your designs on the desired Nintex version to be confident that they function as intended. This blog goes over some of the important 2010 and 2013 products changes and considerations.  Section:1: General product enhancement.2: Action/Control updates.3: Upgrade Strategy4: Rollback options.  1: General product enhancement. Topology enhancements.

A slight variation on Retrieve cities from a database post by Pamela Denchfield‌ where Pamela uses a dropdown to create a cascading dropdown filter on a SQL Request control. We have a lonnnnnnnngggggggg list of suppliers who our users can select from when they want to request a new product.We've cleansed this list as best we can but it still numbers thousands and it's not fun for our users to have to scroll through the dropdown to try and find the needle in the haystack. Because there's no set choice of parent values that would allow us to do a cascading dropdown, we want to let our users search for the suppliers. First add a text box to the form and give it a name, in our case I'm it "SupplierSearch". Then we simply add

I recently had request from a client to show current items in a list for users to preview as they created a new request.   The actual requirement is listed below.Requirement:Allow users to view list items from the current list.  Users should be able to enter the “ID” of the item they want to see in a field on the form, and the form should process and return the fields of the item they specified.Diagnosis:I know some people may be thinking about using views, filtering fields and using a query, or perhaps even using a lookup field to achieve the results.  While there are a few different ways to achieve this that I explored, some with extra code, I decided to use a built in function that was native to Nintex that seems to fit the bill quite easily.Solution:

A person’s name is the sweetest sound to them in any language.  Even in a crowded noisy room, you’ll probably hear your name called out over all the din. Can you relate to when you share a name with someone?  Someone calls out your name “Hey Chris” and you and a different Chris look over at that person and wave?  A little bit embarrassing if it’s not you and a little bit inefficient.  The world would be more efficient if we had unique names but conversations would be difficult: “Hi fingerprint ID 0010010101”“Oh how’s it going fingerprint ID 1001010110?”“Good man.  Good.  Happy New Year to you and your wife fingerprint ID 010111010111” It’s much better when we can use terms such as Cassy, Andrew and Fernando* right?The development world is a bit like this.  Beneath the scenes, everything is referred to using a unique code but we as humans can’t handle this so we’ve made life easier for ourse

Nintex Mobile now supports split-screen multitasking for iOS users! With the new supported capability, you don't have to choose between having the Nintex app or another app open. Instead, you can have two apps side by side.   How can split-screen multitasking improve your Nintex Mobile experience? Let's say you get an email with information scattered throughout. You need to input information from the email into a form in the Nintex Mobile app. Rather than constantly switching between the email app and the Nintex Mobile app, you can use split-screen multitasking to easily fill in the form.  As the example image shows, you can quickly identify the needed information and enter it in the form all at the same time.   Example image showing both apps on one screen. The Nintex Mobile app is on the left and the email app is on the right.

As you may have noticed, in SharePoint , when you publish a workflow on a list or document library, this magical platform creates a status column for your workflow. Wow, fantastic! Oh wait... this is great, isn't it? Well, not exactly.  These columns are created so that when you use the Set Workflow Status action a string of text can be stored that references the instantiated workflow. This is great as it allows me to surface, on the default list view, details about the current progress of the workflow. So, if that's the case, why wouldn't this workflow status column be helpful?  Well, the problem you'll end up running into is that as you build several workflows or have a large number of columns on t

We get this question a lot that why some Runtime Rules work on Android but not on iOS, Windows or Windows Phone. So if you have created a validation rule or formatting rule in Nintex Forms which works on Android but not the other mobile devices, most probably the issue is that you have used a custom JavaScript syntax instead of Nintex Form functions somewhere in your rule.In most of the cases we have seen, users use == instead of equals(), > instead of greaterThan or < instead of smallerThan functions.For example if you are writing a function to check age which is entered in AgeTextBox control you have to write it like this “greaterThan(18,AgeTextBox)”. This would work on all platforms but if you write it as “AgeTextBox > 18″ it would NOT work and is basically not supported.To make sure your Rules work properly on all platform use the functions provided in by Nintex Form and avoid writing any custom JavaScript function in your Rules.

Have you ever wanted to create a Form Rule based on whether or not your form was in New, Edit, or Display mode respectively?  It turns out you can do exactly that without too much effort.  In this example I will show you how to create a Validation Rule to throw an error on the form if the user selects a date that is in the past, but only while the form is in New mode. Let's jump right in! First create your form and drag a date picker control onto the design surface: in this case we'll name it EndDate. Next let's add a Validation Rule to the EndDate control as depicted in the following:By using the formula builder (next to the condition box) I was able to select "Is New Mode" from the Common tab.   "Is New Mode" return true if the form is in New mode and false otherwise. "Is Display Mode" and "Is Edit Mode" are also available under the Common tab.

In a recent release of Nintex, we added always on functionality, but you must also update your connection string when turning on this feature.  Below are the details on the update, as well as a short "How To" for the connection string.  Product version: 3.1.10.0Database version: 3.1.3.0Release date: 2 November 2016 EnhancementsAllow additional connection string parameters for Nintex Content Databases e.g configure SQL Server 2012 as AlwaysOn Below is the Power Shell script below you will need to use to update your parameters for the Connection String used for the Nintex Workflow Configuration

Introduction: The objective of this blog is to share how you can change the notification to the users who are newly assigned in the assignment matrix list during runtime and continue the workflow to move ahead. We came up a situation working with the current project very recently. Scenario: For example: Suppose you have three states say State1, State2 and State3 and you have assigned three users for these three states in the assignment matrix say User1 for State1, User2 for State2 and User3 for State3. Now when the workflow enters into each state it sends a notification to that State user. That notification we can display into the dashboard by filtering the task item for that logged in user from where that logged in user can operate on the associated List form (Remember not the task form) and submit the form. Now, if the workflow enters inside the State2 it will throw the notification to that User2. But for

In one of our projects, we needed to implement a solution to track the visits of sales representatives in form of a visit report. Most of the times there are multiple visit reports for one visit, because multiple representatives attend a visit.In those visit reports the sales representatives should say if they were the driver at the visit or only a passenger. It’s of course possible that not all representatives drive with the same car, for example because of different starting points or follow-up visits. But if they have the same starting point, the same destination and overall there’s no reason why they should not drive together, it probably doesn’t make sense, that they do not drive all together in one car.In these cases, there’s a chance for optimization and we needed a workflow that can discover these optimization possibilities. This workflow needs to be able to identify specific duplicates (visit reports) in a list.In this blog post I’d like to show you how

One of my developers recently contacted me about long term delegation not functioning properly. Because we have multiple clients each with their own URL (host named site collections) we could not use the our of the box people picker provided with delegation and had to build our own form that present a To and From drop down of users in a list. The list is updated each morning from the AD OU of that client. When trying to do a long term delegation the user would get an email with the following message:  Users were using the feature but long term delegation wasn't happening. Current tasks were being delegated fine for all sites. Our users do not have admin rights, and in fact they have pretty limited permissions on their sites. Just enough to get work done. So here's what we found out and how we resolved this problem. First, we discovered that delegation

There is a known licensing schema oddity when upgrading from Forms Standard to Forms Enterprise, that could cause issues for a few customers running older versions of our Forms product.  If you are running Nintex Forms Version 1.9 or less, for SharePoint 2010, or version 2.7 for SharePoint 2013, then you will need to upgrade your environment first, to the latest build of Forms, using a Standard Forms license in the environment, then then import your Forms Enterprise license. Everything moving forward will then work as expected. 

For those that want to activate the new Document Generation feature in your SharePoint environment, here is a quick video on how to get everything configured in your SharePoint Central Administration: Video Link : 1328  Check out Chris' blog post for an overview of the new Document Generation feature here:  As a reminder, you'll need to be running either Nintex for SharePoint 2013, or Nintex for SharePoint 2016 to use the Document Generation action, and you will need to be on at least build 3.2.0.0 or 4.1.0.0 respectively to be able to add the action to your workflows. This is an amazing new feature for Nintex Workflow, and I can't wait to start working with it myself!

Greetings!With the new year, we're excited to announce that with the latest release, designers are able to transport workflows between and within tenants through the export and import feature. Since General Availability, partners and customers have told us they want to:Finish in other tenancies: Build the majority of the workflow design within one tenancy and finish the workflow design within another tenancy. Build for reuse: Create a basic workflow design containing common parts used in most workflows. Share workflow designs: Transfer workflows between designers (within or between tenancies). With export and import, we've implemented a token key based approach to sharing workflows between Nintex Workflow Cloud tenancies. What are the mechanics of exporting and importing a workflow?On exporting workflows:Only published workflows can be exported. A unique

One of the skills every Nintex workflow designer has to learn is how to debug a workflow.  As Andrew Glasser‌ has pointed out in his post Tips on Debugging Workflows, the most common way to do this is to Log information to the History List.  In addition to this there are also times that I will use the Send Notification action to email myself some information at a certain point in the workflow.  In both cases however, these are typically only actions you want to take when developing/debugging a workflow, and don't need them once it's up and running in production.  So what's the best way to turn off these actions once you're ready to publish your workflow? Th

Nintex is by far the best workflow system in SharePoint 2013; but I’d like to suggest some things that would make it more world-class—best-in-breed for workflows. I have outlined the shortcomings of both SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio Workflows in an earlier article. My focus in this piece is how to improve on the good.  Below are four areas that could make a difference in enterprise capability:A Better Functions Library More Robust and Intuitive String Tools A “For Loop” with A Counter to control loops An Action Control to Split Individual Persons from Group Fields Better Functions Library My programming career stretches back 40 years, starting in 1977. Some of my first job assignments were calculating date fields.  I can’t believe I’m st

When clicking Save or Publish on a workflow you may get an error message that reads: soap:ServerServer was unable to process request ---> The ConnectionString property has not been initialized.  The reason for this error, or one of them anyway, is that there is no Nintex Content Database defined for the site. I create my sites with PowerShell and very rarely will the script complete but no DB will be created. So when I got a message from my developer that there was an issue I was perplexed. The solution for this is to simply go and create the DB in Central Administration and associate the site. If you (or if you are an administrator and one of your workflow developers is doing all this) you may get the following error reported instead of the one above:  

This topic came up in a question asked by Sean Docherty (Ability to cancel a workflow) and I wanted to share some of the solutions that were discussed within in a bit more detail. More specifically, I want to highlight that there are multiple ways of doing the same thing, as pointed out by our own Cassy Freeman‌. The AskProvide users the ability to cancel a request and in-turn, terminate the workflow and any outstanding tasks. SolutionsApproach #1: Create a list level workflow that can be triggered and terminate the workflows and then delete the item.Approach #2: Create a site level workflow that can be called to terminate the workflows and delete the item in any list.Alr

Workflows are a way to get repetitive tasks done on SharePoint in the background.  Examples are Approval Workflows for a document, Task Completion Workflows where different steps require different processing, and Scheduled Reminders for work actions or events. Over my nine years of SharePoint, the most common workflows have been a few standard SharePoint Out-of-the-Box Workflows, SharePoint Designer Workflows, Visual Studio Workflows and of late, Nintex Workflows. Out-of-the-Box Workflows have never been flexible enough to adjust for even minor changes. Invariably, you need additional fields or a slightly altered logic flow to accommodate a business circumstance.  They are for the most part immutable. One of the major drawbacks of SharePoint Designer Workflows has been accessing to SharePoint Designer itself. Most installations have very restricted access to SharePoint Designer because the installation, itself, can be damaged in SharePoint D