News and Guidelines

I'm pleased to announce the release of two fantastic new features - Data Source Permissions and Data Source Deletion which are now live on NWC. Not only can users now delete data sources, but they now have the ability to control which users can edit a data source and who can consume it to bind data to the data lookup control. When saving a data source, a permissions dialogue will appear displaying the existing permissions along with edit access, if that user is also the connection owner. Details on the permissions each of the key roles have been outlined below: Connection Owners (owners of the connection used in a data source):The only users that can “Share” the data source with other users by defining who are data source editors and users Will have edit access to the data source and will be able to change the configuration Will be able to delete the data source Can use the data source in forms to bind to a Data Lookup Control  Data Source Editors:Will have edit access to the data sour

                 Preview from: Process purpose informs process language Have you heard the adage: “It’s not what you say – it’s how you say it.”? In the world of process management (and reality in general), this is only half true. A more accurate statement would be: “It’s not only what you say, but how you say it.” “What you say” and “how you say it” should be greatly determined by the purpose you have for saying it in the first place. Speaking specifically of process documentation, “what you say” is the content of the process. “How you say it” is the process language you use to communicate the content to others. The purpose you have in documenting and communicating the process should stem from the process customers – the end users. What is their purpose for having process documentation? Knowing that, you have a greater chance of saying the right thing in the right way. See full post here: Process purpose informs process language

Adobe Sign New Hire ScenarioThis scenario steps through the process of using the Adobe Sign action to send documents for digital signing with the Adobe e-signature platform. Scenario: Your HR department wants to automate the new hire process. Currently, the hiring manager contacts HR to begin the contract process. But with an automation process, the hiring manager fills out a form that populates a template, which is then sent out for digital signing using the company’s Adobe Sign account. The new employee signs the contact and the documents are automatically sent back to HR.   Create a list and formFirst, create a list and a corresponding form. This information is used to populate the contract you send out for signing. For instructions on creating a form with Nintex Forms for Office 365, see Creating and working with forms in the product help.List column Form value Name The name of the new hire. Contact Email Address New hire's email address.  Position  The job titl

Nintex App Studio provides us with the ability to create a mobile application specific to the scenarios/use cases you are automating.  This is made up of a combination of aesthetic changes (logos and colour schemes), tailored content (showing only the forms relevant to the use cases) and extra features not available on the standard Nintex mobile application (custom content). This post will focus on the custom content that you can add.  What do I mean by custom content? Your app can contain any type of "file" that your mobile phone can read. e.g. Pdf documents, MS Office documents, videos, pictures, and here's where it gets interesting, HTML files/web pages. To add any content, add a menu item and select "Content" as the type:I recommend naming the menu item using a single word without spaces e.g. CompanyPolicies.  You can use spaces however some devices will have trouble linking to this. Once you have created this menu item, you can add any of those files I mentioned above up to 50MB w

Further to the recent SPAM incident, we have now implemented a number of measures to minimize the risk of similar incidents impacting the Nintex Community and its members.  As a result, we have now enabled new user registrations. Specifically, we've implemented the following measures:enforcing email validation of new user registrations implementing Captcha for new user registrations and each time another user is to be Private Messaged enabling Private Messaging Opt-In, where registered users can choose whether to enable the Private Messaging function on their account. If you Opt-In to Private Messaging, you can disable email notifications through the My Settings menu.  Notifications will then only occur via the "bell" icon when you sign in to the Nintex Community. monitoring all new user registrations on a daily basis as a further safeguard against suspicious account registrations ______________________________________ On December 2, 2020 a number of Nintex Community members reported r

November saw a collection of new templates from Nintex Workflow Cloud workflows, Promapp process maps, and Nintex Workflow Cloud custom connectors. If you have not yet had a chance to check out the Discover Nintex Workflow Cloud playlist on the Nintex YouTube channel be sure to review it to see how you can build workflow solutions from scratch with Nintex! Alright, now let's take a look at what was built in November. WorkflowsNintex Workflow Cloud Urlaubsantrag - (German Template): Ein Prozess zum Erstellen einer Urlaubsanfrage. Custom ConnectorsUrlday: Generate shortened URLs with UrldayPromappPMBOK 4.1 Develop Project Charter: This process creates a document to formally authorize a project and provide authority to apply key resources within the organization to that work. It ensures a connection between the project goals and the strategic objectives of the business as a whole. PMBOK 13.1 Identify Stakeholders: Identify project stakeholders and analyze and document their interests, inv

Planning ahead When designing a fairly complex workflow/business process it is common for a workflow to become overly complex (in programming this is often referred to as a god object). This can lead to issues down the road such as: Troubleshooting/Debugging difficulties. Difficulty maintaining code/loss of flexibility. Performance degradation on publishing (or even timing out altogether). Performance degradation on initialization (this can affect the entire farm). Inability to export or edit the workflow after publishing. Workflow template corruption (limited to the workflow itself). Workflows should be broken up into more manageable bits whenever possible (in computer science this is called Separation of Concerns‌). An example of this would be a workflow that has multiple stages of approval and logic inside of each approval branch: There are several approaches that can be taken to mitigate these issues: User Defined Actions (UDAs) User defined actions are a great tool for encapsulati

We know that it can be frustrating designing large forms in Nintex Workflow Cloud due to how long it can take to save. We have some fantastic news - by returning the form as an object, the amount of time it now takes to save has been significantly reduced by up to 8 times! Not only that, but these improvements will also reduce loading times.  Details of performance improvements:6-8 times performance improvement when saving task forms  3 times performance improvement when saving start forms  30% improvement on load times of start and task forms  These updates will be performed on that form the next time you save it. For existing forms, the first save will take a little longer while they are updated, after which existing form variables will be replaced and migrated to reference to the new form object. Performance improvements will be apparent on subsequent form loads and saves.  As can be seen by the image above, to access the form controls, simply navigate to the same place you would ha

Nintex Migration Coaching We are excited to announce a new program designed to ensure your Nintex migration has a successful outcome.Visit our Migration Center to review documentation and interact with the community.  We have coaches with years of experience ready to assist you for both cloud migrations and migrations to a new version of Sharepoint to help you develop a plan best suited to meet your goals and timelines and ensure a successful outcome.  Do not hesitate to Book a session with a coach from our support team to help you build your migration plan. Who is this for? Our Migration Coaching sessions are aimed at Project Managers or System Administrators in charge of assessing, planning, and implementing a migration. When embarking on this project the coaching session can be used to dive into the expected technical challenges and differences between platforms. Migrating to the Cloud If you are planning on migrating to the cloud your Nintex coach will focus on:Deciding which cloud

So whenever you send out this contract please make sure to update the status of the Salesforce Opportunity. Also make sure the correct Sharepoint list has the same status. Also after everything is said and done and the contract is signed make sure to save the final version in a folder in Box… Not hard to handle this when you have done it hundreds of times. When you are new to an organization this can be a bit to learn. What happens when your sales team goes from 5 to 30 overnight? How do you minimize mistakes and ramp up user adoption?  The majority of the time when task and updates need to be done and updated in this manner logic typically exists to dictate next steps. If this… then… do that… As mentioned above this can be a bit of a learning curve for one use case. But most of us have more then one task type a day. In addition when you want to scale employee size and expand knowledge this manual process could be difficult to adopt.  No matter how simple or complex… when automation ex

Some really great templates were added in October with a focus on Nintex Workflow Cloud to help highlight some of the new features and functionality that has been delivered to that product. If you have not yet had a chance to check out the Discover Nintex Workflow Cloud playlist on the Nintex YouTube channel be sure to review it to see how you can build workflow solutions from scratch with Nintex! Alright, now let's take a look at what was built in October. WorkflowsNintex Workflow Cloud Food Premises Assessment Report: This template uses Nintex Document Generation and a responsive form to allow field teams to capture information from businesses that serve food. Student Enrollment Application: Provide parents with an easy way to submit applications for new students using NWC and SharePoint Online. Purchase Order Request: Provide customers with an easy to use request form that integrates with your CRM system, creates all the required records, and then generate a dynamic Purchase Order

Given the current global climate, Microsoft said in March that Teams usage had grown to 44 million daily active users. It’s now jumped another 70 percent - during one of their latest investor calls, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Teams usage has increased to more than 75 million daily active users. Its evident Teams has become the enterprise collaboration hub for teamwork, with organisations seeing the benefits of Teams, some of which includes: Chat-based communication instead of email Channels instead of folders Workspaces allowing you to securely edit files at the same time. The liking of content, @mentions and replies.  But with all good things, comes a great level of risk – with Teams, it’s the management and governance controls which become the biggest hurdle. There are various ways for a user to create a team, and as such, these are some of the pitfalls: Teams and Site sprawl Potential Data loss Permission issues Organisations should think of ways to manage their Team

Nintex Forms allows for Cascading Drop Downs which can improve the functionality of your forms, but what if you wanted to include a third-tier to the cascading drop down? Let's take a look at how to configure a three-tier cascading drop down using Nintex Forms! The Setup For this example, we are creating, in total, four lists (List A, List B, List C, and Meal Order). Below is what List A -  C look like: List Configuration  Notice the following: List A contains the Single Line column 'Title' data that will feed into the 'Meal Time' List Lookup used on List B. List B contains the List Lookup column, 'Meal Time' (from List A), and a Single Line column, 'Meal Type'. List C contains the List Lookup column, 'Meal Type' (from List B), and a Single Line column, 'Beverage'. These are the columns used when creating the list, 'Meal Order', which will be where we build our Nintex Form. Below is the configuration of the 'Meal Order' list columns: Meal Order - Col

Welcome to the first blog of my new series!Nintex vTE Giving back to the Community:  Getting Started with Nintex Forms As a Nintex vTE I’m approached daily by colleagues and customers making requests of me to come up with creative and efficient solutions for some super complex business problems.  This blog isn’t about any of that though.  Rather, its purpose is to help those of you who may be new and perhaps struggling to get started.  It’s my intention to save you time by avoiding some common pitfalls, while teaching you some of the basics.  Moreover, it’s about giving back to the Community.  Join me now as we explore Nintex Forms. Assumptions:  Nintex forms is already installed; User possesses general SharePoint knowledge. Intended Audience:  Someone new to Nintex Forms.  Although the examples in this tutorial were done in on-prem, O365 will be very similar. Level:  BeginnerVersion Information:  Sharepoint 2013 (On-prem), Nintex Forms Version: 2.9.4.0 You’ve just received word that N

Hi! One of the nice features of Nintex forms is an ability to create a repeating section within a single form. This allows you to add multiple lines of something, IE sales and then tally the rows up.  One of the problems is easily reporting on this row data. If you export to Excel you just get the ‘Rows’ within the form in a single field as XML. I wanted to create an excel report that split out these xml fields into individual rows and be refreshable. Power Query to the rescue with a bit of help from my power query guru. The following is a guide on splitting that data into individual rows using excel and power query and connecting directly to the Sharepoint list to create a refreshable report. WHAT YOU NEEDFirst off you need your sharepoint list and make sure your repeating section is connected to a multiple line field to capture the XML. All of the fields you’ve added in the repeating section should be named. You will then need Excel 2013 onwards with the latest version of PowerQuery.

I was recently asked how to calculate business days within a Nintex Form.  Here is a video on how I achieved a result, but this is just a quick example and still requires thorough testing to see if it meets your business requirements.  Here is the function:  ifElse ( /* IF MORE THAN 1 WEEK DIFFERENCE */ dateDiff("TotalWeeks",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) != 0, /* SUBTRACT 2 DAYS PER WEEK FOR WEEKENDS */ (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1) - (2 * dateDiff("TotalWeeks",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date])), ifElse ( /* SUBTRACT 2 DAYS */ (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1 >= 7) || (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1 >= 6 && formatDate([Form].[Start date],"dddd") == "Tuesday") || (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date]) + 1 >= 5 && formatDate([Form].[Start date],"dddd") == "Wednesday") || (dateDiff("TotalDays",[Form].[Start date],[Form].[End date

Excerpt from: Words and categories matter in process management My guess is that you have heard the axiom: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” If there were a process management equivalent, it would go something like this: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words used without proper definitions will derail my process management implementation.” Ok, so maybe this version does not exactly roll off the tongue, but I promise you there is a point. Imagine you are working to embed process management as a discipline into your business. What are you, primarily at least, seeking to manage by doing this? Is it fair to say you are primarily seeking to manage processes? If so, then the primary scope of the implementation effort must be centered on managing processes – not on managing other types of business information (ie: policy, guides, forms, training, etc.). This means the technology you use, methods you employ, and stakeholders you engage must be foc

PD 20.9.0 pushes the limit of data processing, significantly reducing the time it takes to find a process. We have wrapped it with an exciting new user interface, so that business analysts can now explore, analyze, and map processes for automation, with no effort. WHAT IS INCLUDED? A NEW WAY TO DISCOVER PROCESSESThe ‘Discovery’ experience is quicker and easier.The new discovery page runs the discovery algorithm in real-time and lets you quickly review the findings.Spotted a meaningful process? Save it to the Process Library for further analysis. VIDEO PREVIEWSWe’ve added a video preview for every discovered process so you can watch a short simulation of how the process is done in real life by a user. BETTER STATISTICSAiding statistical information is now available for every discovered process: process duration, application used, mouse vs. keyboard distribution, and more. TAG PROCESSES BY "BUSINESS USE CASE"Just to make it easier for you to categorize and to scan through processes, we'v

Deprecate support for Internet Explorer 11 and support the new Microsoft Edge Microsoft has recently announced that their Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11). In addition, with the release of the new Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and high user adoption of it since January, Microsoft will be ending support for the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app. The following are the key dates from Microsoft with regards to browser support:Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11. After March 9, 2021, the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app will not receive new security updates. Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11. As the Nintex (Forms and Workflow) for Office 365 offering integrates and leverages Microsoft 365, Nintex will follow suit and phase out support for Internet Explorer 11 and look to support the new Microsoft Edge. For Nintex (Forms and Work

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an encryption protocol that ensures privacy and data integrity of information passed between two communicating applications. It’s the most widely deployed security protocol in use today and is used for web browsers and other applications that require data to be securely exchanged over a network. TLS ensures that a connection to a remote endpoint is the intended endpoint through encryption and endpoint identity verification.   Nintex Live services uses TLS as a key component of its security and the current version supported is TLS 1.2. To ensure the industry security standards are met, the support of legacy TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will be removed as they no longer meet the security standards.  From December 1st 2020, Nintex will update the Live Router to remove support for Legacy Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0, 1.1. If any Nintex Live services are in use, you will be required to update your SharePoint deployment to support TLS 1.2 to ensure that the followi

Want to trigger Dynamic Documents to run based on a Condition in Salesforce? Of course you do! There are many ways to accomplish this. Let’s talk about doing it with Nintex Workflow Cloud or NWC. There are countless reasons and ways this could be done. BUT… Why do it with NWC? Salesforce has workflow solutions. How excited you are about my answer also depends on what you are trying to do. I’m not saying go replace everything with NWC when everything is already working. It's more an opportunity to enhance.  Simple use-case… Something happens in Salesforce and a Document is generated. NWC has no problem handling this. Neither does Salesforce. How about this… Something happens in Salesforce and based on a percentage calculation it has to go through an approval process. The approval process could have two to three approvers based on many parts of the data model. This approval needs to be handled via a form because there is additional content gathered beyond yes/no approve/decline. Once app

A common request over the years has been the ability to translate text into multiple different languages using a Nintex Worklfow. In this example, I've created a new Xtension that will interface with the Google Cloud Translate API, providing native translation services within your workflow. If you'd like to see a video walkthrough of this Xtension in action, please check out the embedded video below:  To download this Xtension or to get more details on how your Google Cloud account needs to be configured to use this Xtension, please check out the page for this Xtension on the Nintex Process Accelerator Gallery. For this example, I'll be running through a baseline request where we're translating some text and sending it via email.  To start, I have configured my start event to be a form with two fields. 1) Translate Text (where the text I want to translate will be provided) and 2) an email (to send the recipient the translated text via email).   Next I'll configure the Translate Text ac

I wanted to put together this overview to help show case the number of new templates that have been added to the Nintex Process Accelerator Gallery (PAG) over the month of September. Because we did not have a "Month In Review" post last month I am also going to include some of the templates that were added in the last days of August to make sure that no one misses anything exciting! Some really great templates were added in September, so let's dig in! Process Maps (Promapp)Know Your Customer: Outlines the manual and automated steps for an organization to onboard and verify the identity of a new customer Emergency Risk Assessment: Identify and analyze potential hazards and their impact on the business in the event of an emergency Emergency Response Plan: A good emergency response plan keeps people safe and stabilizes incidents as effectively as possible Emergency Response - Evacuation: In the case of a fire or chemical event, an evacuation may be required Emergency Response - Shelter: I

Excerpt from: The elusiveness of operational excellence Doubtless you have heard the term “operational excellence” used before, perhaps even in your own organization. It seems that many businesses want to be operationally excellent – after all, who would not want that? I cannot say I have ever met an organization who wanted to be operationally average. But often those desires go unfulfilled as organizations fail to make the necessary changes to transition from average to excellent. Last week I was presenting to a group on this very topic of operational excellence. I started by attempting to define the term which is harder than it may appear. As with so many business buzzwords, nailing down a precise definition proved a bit challenging. However, despite the existence of more definitions for “operational excellence” than Baskin-Robbins flavors (by my count they are up to 46), we can minimally agree that it involves maximizing the value your organization produces, while at the same time l

 Starting a Nintex Component Workflow from Microsoft Dynamics is made simple by Flow actions. You start this process by first copying the API URL from within Nintex Workflow Cloud.    Next you transition over to Micosoft Dynamics and choose to create a new Flow from the entity you wish to initiate the NWC call from.             This will route you to the Flow designer where you can add an "HTTP + Swagger" action. This is a premium dynamics action and may incur addition licensing cost.                   Within the "HTTP + Swagger" action, you can paste your API URL from NWC.               Pasting in this URL will automatically make your component workflow visible and create fields for the content needed in the body of the Http action. From here, you simply need to insert dynamic or static content into these fields so dynamics can forward this to the input variables for the component workflow.               Once you save this flow, you can run the http action directly from your dynamics