All hail the Manager functionality in Nintex Workflow for Office 365.  As with most of you, you're probably excited as I am about this little nugget.  Although there was a work around, using the Query User Profile action, this release now gives us 3 workflow context properties about the initiators manager, that will make life so much easier.  the Query User Profile is still useful, in that you can get the manager of other users, but if you want to deal with the initiators manager, which is most workflows, then these properties are perfect.

Here are the three properties:

Manager login name

Manager display name

Manager email address

First of all, in order to get this to work, you will need to request your system administrator to grant Nintex Workflow access to the User Profiles (this only needs to be done once per site, then it'll be in effect for all workflows created on the site thereafter - refer to the help for more details).

The System Administrator will need to click on the Administration Settings cog at the top right of the workflow designer.

Then, click the Grant Access button:

You'll be provided with a Trust pop up and once you trust it, you'll have the ability to use the above properties in your workflow.

So where do these properties come in useful?

The login and email address can be used for assigning tasks, using the Assign a Task action or the Start of a Task Process action.  If you're looking at building out a Leave Approval process, Expense Claim process, Travel Request... all of these will most likely have some sort of approval in them, and the first round is usually the initiators manager.

But what I like to do, is not just assign tasks, but customize the email notification so that it is personalized.

In this case, we'll be using the Manager display name property and the Initiator display name property.

We're using a Regular Expression action to remove the whitespace and the last group of letters from the Display name, so that we are left with just the first name.  We do the same thing with the Initiators display name property.  I like to design my workflows so that they work and they are easier to maintain.  So I put the two regular expressions in a Parallel Branches action.

Now that we have the first names, we can assign a task to the manager.  Adding the Manager email address to a task is easy :

Don't forget to click the Insert button.

We can also update the Task Title:

Finally, we want to customize the Email itself that goes out to the manager:

Notice how to have started the email with a Hi and the managers first name, and also in the body, we specify who it was that requested the leave request.  Very easy to do, and makes for a better user experience with dealing with task notifications.

I've attached the workflow described here, so that you can see how easy it is to work with the new Manager properties.

If you have any questions, please add them as comments to this post.