Back in the olden days when I used Nintex for SharePoint, one of my go-to functions was the UserProfileLookup. It was so handy to look up details of the person. Now with my main tool of choice, Nintex Automation Cloud, I don't need to use it because I've got features like Azure Active Directory lookups. However there are properties that are only stored in SharePoint - most of these revolve around the social aspect of SharePoint such as "About me", "Ask me about" and "Interests".
Those who are used to this query, you had to go and find the internal name and then query that. If you're interested, here's the list of the default properties and internal names however before you get ahead of yourself, you don't need that list any more in Nintex Automation Cloud because we do it for you.
In my example form, I've put a people picker in place so I can easily select a person's name.
Of course you don't have to use this - all we need to look up someone's profile details is their email address which you could type into an email/text field. The people picker returns a bunch of information already such as first name, full name etc but as we just want their email and in my case because I'm only selecting one person, I can extract this using a form variable.
Now that I have their email, I use the (SharePoint) Query user profile action to retrieve their details.
It returns all their details in an easily accessible object. No more looking up those internal names. Here's an example retrieving "About me", "Ask me about" and "interests" and logging them.
Oh and if you're a Google Mail user, there's the same type of action for you too - we share the love across all platforms! 😀
On a similar note, we've also added the ability to Get members of a SharePoint group. Once again, it's a single workflow action that is really easy to set up. You pick the SharePoint connection that you are using, enter the site and hit the Retrieve groups button. We'll fetch all the groups for that site and you pick the group that you want to interrogate.
Please note like lots of our "helper" actions where we retrieve the group names for you to pick from a drop down list that you can also supply the group name via a variable. This is particularly if the group doesn't exist yet - as long as you can supply the name via a variable, then you can access it.
The output of this action is an object that contains two collections:
- Emails - all their emails (e.g. if you simply wanted to email everyone in that group), and
- Members - further details about each member
As an example, if we wanted to email all members of that group (or send them a task) then we can use the Emails collection.
Or if you wanted to make use of the extra data such as their name, you can use the Loop for each action and pass through the Members collection.
Have fun with these actions. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here.
