In my dealing with customers, there are some questions and confusions that keep coming up. I thought I'd share them to help others who may have the same query's.
Why is Nintex Different?
Fully Leverage SP
Nintex Workflow is built natively on SharePoint using pre-existing SharePoint infrastructure and the Windows Workflow Foundation. The benefit is that you leverage your existing architecture and infrastructure and avoid incurring the costs of implementing, serving, and supporting additional platforms.
Install in minutes
Nintex Workflow installs in minutes. No need to install clunky or outdated add-ons to client machines as required by some other workflow solutions.
Design and deploy quickly
Workflows are designed with no down time. When you create and publish your workflow, Nintex simply picks up the new design when the next instance runs. Unlike options from other vendors who require that every designed workflow must be compiled, packaged, deployed, and activated before they can be used.
No code required
Nintex is designed for value and easy adoption by business users. Our renowned industry-leading interface allows immediate creation of workflows for new users while rich and deep functionality extends value for power users. Because developer skills are not required to create Nintex workflows, you have faster deployment, easier updates and modifications, and lower total costs.
No additional software or hardware required
There are no requirements for Kerberos installation to work with SharePoint, no additional hardware resources needed, no Silverlight requirements, and no client-side software installation.
Connect and extend with Nintex in the cloud
Nintex provides a robust set of workflow actions for the applications and tools that can make your workflows drive incredibly enhanced productivity. From updating social sites like Yammer and Twitter, leveraging Dropbox or Box.net, geolocation services, and more, Nintex’s cloud services let you get more work done in the way your teams work.
Get mobile
Use Nintex forms, tasks, approvals, and more to enable your organization to get more done and keep work flowing on any device, anywhere. The benefit is a more productive organization that can act in real time with the devices they use every day.
Take it to the cloud
Cloud, On Premise, Hybrid – we’ve got that. Nintex has you covered with the most flexible choices for deployment and licensing of your SharePoint and Office 365 environments. The real benefit is that we adapt your choices today for the future.
Nintex Misperceptions
Misperception - Integrating with other systems:
Nintex is unable to connect to other systems. For example, SAP.
Answer
Nintex supports multiple integration points including web service requests, web requests, multiple queries (SQL, Oracle, XML, OLAP, OLEDB, LDAP, BCS, etc.), CRM integration and BizTalk, and even your own custom solutions. According to our over 5,000 customers and 1,000 partners, the integration found in our products is comparable, in terms of development effort, if not easier to integrate in most cases than alternative workflow solutions.
Misperception - Rewinding a Workflow
Nintex is unable to rewind a workflow or retract a workflow action that has already occurred due to error.
Answer
Changes mid-workflow are very rare. In the case that there might be a need to ‘re-route’ a workflow due to an error or other concern, Nintex provides powerful error-trapping capabilities within its actions, which you can leverage and build additional workflow logic around to address workflow rewinds and re-routing. This gives you powerful flexibility in managing your workflows.
Misperception – Running Long Workflows
As we know, workflows can last years, if Nintex is tied to SharePoint, what are the guarantees that the engine will allow you to run workflows for many years?
Answer
Using multiple master workflows and sub-workflows, it’s technically simple to create business process tracking functionality with our start workflow action, and scheduled workflows task. These allow you to set specific time frames to start or resume your workflow, automatically picking up with the newest design.
Misperception – Changing a Workflow as it’s Running
Nintex supports version control, however you can’t change something in a workflow, and have all of the existing running workflows complete with the new version. Instead you would need to terminate the workflow and start it again if you wanted it to use the newest version. Other workflow solutions allow you to pause and change the workflow as it is running.
Answer
Changes mid-workflow are very rare. And from an auditing and reporting perspective, if you change the workflow midway through, you’d lose the ability track and baseline results. If, for some reason you are changing workflows continuously in a production environment, Nintex gives you the ability to develop simple business logic where ‘master’ workflows are able to execute other sub-workflows to manage these cases of changing workflow versions mid-workflow.
Misperception – Handling Complex Workflows
Nintex uses the SharePoint workflow engine, which is a weak engine and can’t handle complex workflows or heavy loads.
Answer
Nintex is an enterprise grade workflow tool. We have nearly 300 of the Fortune 500, and over half the Fortune 50 using Nintex to automate their business processes. Some of our largest customers run upwards of hundreds of thousands of workflows a week. Microsoft has developed a very robust and powerful workflow engine; Nintex enables this workflow for everyone.
Nintex utilizes the Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5. As Nintex is a custom solution we expand the capabilities found in the normal workflow engine in SharePoint on-prem so it is not a 1:1 comparison between how Nintex workflow jobs are processed and SharePoint Designer / OOTB workflows. As a provider hosted app in Office 365, all Nintex workflows are processed through the Windows Workflow Manager farm where advanced execution occurs securely between the Workflow Manager farm and Nintex's cloud services in Microsoft Azure.
