By now, you’ve heard that we’re changing the names of several Nintex products, including Nintex Automation (formerly known as K2 Five). The name and colors may change, but the features you know and love are still there, and some new things are now available! Available now to download on Nintex Customer Central (be sure to filter for “Nintex Automation” in the products drop-down menu), the latest version includes some great new features, including:
- Style Profile: preview form. Select your own form to use as the preview form in the Style Profile Designer, and now you can see the impact of your chosen colors and linked CSS/JS files on your own form, without having to have multiple tabs open or check-in your form or style profile.
- Style aware controls. Building on the Style Profile color variables, now the ratings control, radio buttons and checkboxes, and toolbar buttons respond to the color variables to automatically change color and match your branding profile.
- Nintex Automation product rename. As part of the unification and rebranding effort at Nintex, you’ll see references to K2 removed from the product (including the management, designer and workspace sites), and documentation and the installer use the new “Nintex Automation” name, to align with the broader product portfolio. Nintex Automation is here to stay, and you’ll see further alignment with the Nintex portfolio as we work towards a connected platform.
- Licensing enhancements. You can now export your licensing reports from the Management site to Excel format instead of just PDF, to make it easier to see your usage. We also check nightly for expiration dates for subscription license keys.
- Exchange Online SmartObject enhancement. You can now utilize the “From Address” property when using the Exchange Online Email SmartObject to get to the email address instead of just the display name for email addresses.
- SQL Server 2022 support. Now you can install 5.7 on SQL Server 2022 if that’s part of your upgrade or new environment strategy.
- Performance enhancements. As we continue to work on migrating frameworks, the workflow designer performance and stability is a main focus area. In this release you’ll see performance gains in the properties panel and the design canvas itself. We’ve also removed a dependency on SignalR which greatly speeds up the workflow design experience. The two-minute autosave is still there, but we no longer persist each click and character typed, for greatly improved performance.
- jQuery version updates. As part of the ongoing work to update libraries, the jQuery library used in SmartForms has been updated to the 3.7 version. This update mitigates security vulnerabilities and has refactored all out of the box usage to remove deprecated components. For more information, see https://community.nintex.com/news-18/tech-bulletin-jquery-upgrades-for-smartforms-60031.
- Stability and security fixes. All fixes released since 5.6 have been included in 5.7, and we will continue to release fixes weekly as necessary throughout the standard support window.
On top of that already impressive list of features for upgrading customers, we’ve got an exciting update to our SharePoint integration! Now utilizing the new SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and the modern webhooks for workflow events, we’ve invested in our SharePoint integration. This is the largest update to our SharePoint integration since the CSOM enhancements with SharePoint 2013, and we’re super excited about this! It lets us remain supported with Microsoft’s changes to SharePoint for years to come. With 5.7, new customers will use this new integration path for SharePoint Online. Existing integrations or upgrades will remain on the legacy integration at this time. In future releases, we will be shipping migration tools to help existing customers migrate their SharePoint solutions from the old event receivers and app model to the new webhooks and SPFx app. We will also be releasing this to K2 Cloud customers once we’ve got those migration tools in place. And we’re also looking at bringing this to SharePoint on-prem integrations, so watch the roadmap for future plans.
For more information about any of these features, check out the release notes for links to further documentation. Stay tuned for more video-based information through the How-To Center, and be sure to check out Nintex University for updates to the training.
