In Part 1 we explored the new Nintex SharePoint Connectors for our Domestic Animal Registration example and successfully published a Public Web Form and added our responses to SharePoint Online which triggered an internal review and approval process.
Part 2 is all about our backend process to save our users even more time and effort. Remember those paper / email received forms our Chris City Council workers received. Well once they've approved them internally they need to update a central CRM (Salesforce) by adding the record. They either do this by typing directly from that paper form or copy and pasting from the email received PDF. We also need to inform the member of the public that submitted the form and provide them with a Proof of Registration which is a council generated document that we also do manually. So let's get started.
I'm going to create a backend process workflow in Nintex Workflow Cloud with the Start event of External start. This is going to allow me to initiate this workflow via my Office 365 internal process. It's a lot easier to connect directly to the number of SaaS application that I'm working with here as opposed to within my Office 365 tenant (however, Nintex does offer Salesforce and Dynamics CRM connectors as part of the Office 365 product). I've also replicated the variables from part 1 so I can reuse the same info throughout the process.
I'm going to introduce a little smarts here in case I was processing this on batch using Nintex Workflow Cloud Scheduled Start (for purposes of demos I want this to kick off as an entire process but some organisations might want this to be batch). So I'll make sure that only those items in my list that have gone through the Approval process are picked up for processing using the SharePoint Online Query a list action and because this may be a number of items greater than 1 I'll need a Collection variable declared to iterate through.
The next group of actions I need to do are all related to whether an Application has been marked as Approved. I need the process to -
- Retrieve application details
- Generate a unique certificate number
- Generate a document and store in an electronic file share ( e.g. Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive)
- Create a Salesforce record
- Contact application via SMS and email certificate
- Update my SharePoint Online item to Completed
For Each 'Approved' application let's retrieve those details from SharePoint Online and Generate a Certificate Number.
Now we need to Generate that Certificate. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Nintex Workflow Cloud Document Generation. Platform agnostic cloud Document Generation complete with Nintex Document Tagger capabilities. Essentially the Nintex Document Tagger is opening up all the workflow and item property references that I can merge into my cloud stored document at execute. Really clever stuff. I just copy the variable tag I want and paste it into the template. And the awesome news, Document Generation is now General Availability!
OK, unique document generated, simples. Next we need to put this into our structured data repository, Salesforce CRM. Could equally be Dynamics CRM as Nintex have connectors for that. I've created a custom object in Salesforce for my Domestic Animal reg records so we can even find that via our Salesforce connectors.
We want to be able to attach that generated document to an email for our applications records and we need to check back in with SharePoint Online to update the status of the application now that everything is 'Completed'.
Not long to go. I just need to let me application know that they're animal has been registered with the council and to provide them the certificate of registration. With such a heavy reliance on mobile phones and the instant notification, what we'll do is SMS a note to say the animal has been registered using Twilio, and we'll email the certificate to the applicant.
My very last stage is to publish this workflow, grab that External Start URL so I can initiate it from my Office 365 SharePoint Online Nintex Workflow and then we're done.
Just to recap, parts 1& 2 we've covered a considerable amount of Nintex Workflow Cloud functionality to fully digitize my Chris City Council external application process -
- Public Anonymous Forms
- Create an Item in Office 365 SharePoint Online
- Initiate a Nintex Workflow Cloud workflow from Office 365 SharePoint Online
- Referenced that Office 365 SharePoint Online list
- Generated a document from a cloud stored template with my item data and sent that to our applicant
- Created a Salesforce record for a custom object
- Sent SMS and email confirmation
- Updated an item in an Office 365 SharePoint Online list
