News and Guidelines

There are times when a user does not want to go through each and every email to approve a task. There are also times when a list item is deleted; however, the task is still out there for that item. To display the task list for users in SharePoint: Go to Lists->Workflow Tasks Click on the link Copy the URL Create a new item in the Quick Launch and paste the URL there Users can filter the list on their name or check on the status of other users To display one task link in Nintex email notifications:In your email notification, you can 'Insert Reference' and select 'Workflow Status URL' All the user will have to do is click on 'Respond to Task' Personally, I give all the users the information they need in the email to approve/reject. In addition, I attach any files. That way they can perform a lazy approval if they so choose to. Where I work, the URLs are

2020 saw the release of the Microsoft Lists app for Office 365. The app allows you to create a list from scratch, import from Excel or a template to track and organise information to share with your company or teams. Not radically different from the concepts which underpin SharePoint lists behaviour, now in a slightly decoupled app experience. So.... Does Nintex support Microsoft Lists? Let’s take a look…. First I’ll need to create a list. Access the Office 365 app launcher or waffle and select Lists. Create a Blank List or create a list from a template or existing list. Or Import from Excel.

I recently was asked how can a designer change the look of a form based on the user who is accessing the form when using Nintex New Responsive Forms for Office365. To explain how I would do this with the video below.  Cheers,Euan

IntroductionLists are a great tool to utilize while building out your botflows. They can help simplify complex logic, serve as a data source or as a quick lookup to help translate values.  While we have a lot of great documentation on the actions themselves, I thought it would be very helpful to put together a reference on how to get the most out of Lists in Nintex RPA. For the sake of length, I’ll split this up into a series. I’ve published one a little out of order in Creating Randomized Data with Nintex RPA, which really should have been published after this one. This blog will serve as an introduction, with either one or two follow ups to cover more in-depth utilization of Lists. Creating a List“Sounds like Lists are great, and they can do a lot, but how do I ac

Hello all, One of the most regular workflow designs I see with all lines of business is the use of multiple approvals are repeating the same actions but with only minor differences each time. Currently it seems the preferred method to solve such workflows will be to use State machines to build branches for each step, Although this works and is fairly straight forward to pull off, I believe it has some minor drawbacks in some situations and in some extreme cases in the cloud, may cause bad workflow performance and throttling. The kind of state machine I am talking about may look a little like the below but can be much bigger.             I regularly see state machines where at first they were ma

Do you have a need to automate some telephony using Nintex Workflow? This could include sending text message reminders or notifications, or making voice calls where your workflow can notify a person of an upcoming event, a reminder of an appointment or that a package is ready to be picked up. Nintex Workflow can be used to perform these functions via third party integration, such as communicating to Twilio.  You can read more about what Twilio offers on their site.  If you want to try this out, Twilio allows you to sign up for a trial account to make sure you can get this working from your workflow. This post will be about how to get N

Excerpt from: To automate, or not to automate, that is the question To automate, or not to automate, that is the question.It is not uncommon for organizations riding the digital transformation wave to answer the question above with a resounding: "TO AUTOMATE!"To that, I reply: "To automate what, exactly?"As a reminder, process management is the practice of improving company performance through managing and optimizing business processes. Automation is a tactic for process optimization and logically follows initial process documentation and management. Flipping the order - or ignoring process documentation entirely - will lead to frustration. 

To support the growing number of people managing their processes using Nintex Promapp, we are upgrading the infrastructure that hosts your site.Starting in July 2020, we will be upgrading customers to the new infrastructure, which includes a switch to Microsoft Azure as our cloud infrastructure provider.Why are we upgrading?We are upgrading our platform to align our security controls across the organization and provide a consistent access experience across platforms.Also, the upgrade will provide the key benefits listed below:Scale - Allowing us to scale more effectively by using more PaaS offerings. Security Monitoring - Nintex security log monitoring and infrastructure scanning. Shared Knowledge - Shared patterns, practices, and knowledge across the Nintex Production Operations team. Access Controls - Centralized management of users through in

As part of obtaining a license for Nintex Workflow and Forms for Office 365 you (or your customer) will have to provide Nintex with the Office 365 tenant ID. There is two options to find the tenant ID:Run a PowerShell script Check within the Nintex appsOption 1 might be a bit too difficult unless you are happy to work with PowerShell AND have the appropriate permissions.Option 2 on the other hand is rather easy:If you haven't dont so already, install the Nintex Workflow app from the SharePoint App store Navigate to any list or library within the site you just installed the app in Click on "Nintex Workflow" within the "List Tab" in the ribbon bar The workflow designer will now open. Expand the drop-down under "Information" and select "About"     Th

Excerpt from: Detailed simplicity: a path to process engagement  What is detailed simplicity?Detailed simplicity is a method of organizing process information to maximize its readability and usefulness. In other words, it is a way to combat the all-too familiar spaghetti-style process maps or the seemingly endless standard operating procedure manuals (which are typically a mash-up of policy statements, process standards, and procedure information). Why push back against these traditional methods of sharing process information? Well, at the end of the day, they discourage engagement. This matters because organizations should desire to have their processes positively i

As our customers and partners continue to explore (xplore?) the wonderful world of the Nintex Xtensions framework, there are often questions about how to work/ interact with different components of a particular API. I'll be providing some additional examples of Xtensions over the next few blog posts that highlight how to accomplish different goals when building an Xtension, while hopefully also opening up some fun new options for actions within the tools!  In today's blog post, I am going to walk through how to configure an action that outputs to an audio file. I'll be using the WellSaidLabs text-to-speech rendering service for this example, as it does a good job highlighting a common use case from our customers (converting text to audio) while maintaining an API that is clearcut for the example.  I've provided a video walkthrough as well that can be seen below:  First to start, we will nee

parent child‌ forms ‌ ‌ MeFirst of all, excuse my english, please.I'm not an expert, but I would like to share with you my first significant development using Nintex Forms. It could be easy, but I'm very happy with it   I have just developed a Parent / Child structure using List view control to show child list inside Parent Form. The idea is to have child data in a independent list in order to manage the elements properly.I'm not satisfied with the repeating section to do it, because data is not easy to manage later, for example if you want to do tasks for each child element using workflow, or to make a report downloading the lists to Excel file and working with Power Pivot. 

Excerpt from: Using process reviews to maintain the gains The big transformationLast spring, I had a professional landscaping company come to my house and replace the weeds that dominated my front yard with new sod. They also converted one large planter into two smaller ones and added fresh mulch. The contrast between the new yard and old yard was startling. Not long after they had completed their work, I began to notice that the new grass, although certainly healthier and more attractive than my old weeds, still required a minimum level of work in order to maintain that stark contrast over the old weeds. The “big transformation” had temporarily solved many of my problems – an unsightl

But what does DMAIC have to do with a process culture in sub-themes? Simply put, it lays the foundation for optimally managed process optimization according to Six-Sigma. From my experience over the last 14 years, this topic is often misunderstood. Processes are seen as an annoying evil, yet they are at the heart of every company.  If processes are not optimally defined, the implementation cannot be applied in a resource-saving way. This is reflected in the costs and earnings of a company. It is therefore important for companies to establish process optimization as a corporate or even process culture.  Long-term success through responsibilities and the right communication Make sure that such a project is always driven by C-level. True to the motto "We are all pulling together", long-term success can be achieved in this way. If this is not the case, unavoidable grievances will arise that run through the entire company. 

A huge part of sales enablement is creating tailored and effective emails for your sellers. If you use a powerful sales tool like Salesforce, it only makes sense to leverage the data inside of your CRM to drive the emails for drip campaigns, lead communication and prospective emails that close business. Most customers will gravitate to Salesforce email templates to do a direct mail merge of Salesforce data into the message of an email. However, Salesforce email templates have certain limitations that restrict the type of content you can generate. There's no support for multiple line items or conditional lines of text.                 Historically, Drawloop customers

Last month I wrote the first part of this blog and that was focused on the Nintex Form piece of this solution. This month we will focus is on how to take those individual items on the single form and create a list item for each one. There are many scenarios that this could come in to play such as breaking out each item in a request to better understand metrics or even running processes on individual item rather than on the entire submission.  For this scenario I will continue from the last blog and frame it as an expense report. The report will allow for each submission to have multiple items on the report, but we want to break out each item into a separate list for additional processing. For this, we will need to create a separate list to push the necessary data into. Keep in mind that this is the list is whe

I saw a number of posts on this topic with no real clear solution.   I would like to present my solution here.   It is based on the work of a number of people on this forum. But first I would like to state that  it is beyond comprehension why Nintex does not have the option to validate before Save and Continue right out of the box.   We should not have to come up with a hack for something that common sense says should  have been a part of the original design. Now for the solution. 1. Place a Save and Continue button on your form. 2. Give it a class names something like SaveAndContinueXYZZY.  You should be able to store the ID in a JavaScript variable but yet another thing beyond comprehension is why this feature is not available for buttons.   It is probably a good idea to take the extra step of using your own class as opposed to using  what Nintex provides because if they change their design then your form will still work.

 A few months back I was fortunate to attend an education roadshow in South Africa, and I presented a Student Onboarding Scenario in 5 minutes. Yes we were only given five minutes haha. Decided to do a chilled 11 minute version and provide some useful links below. Enjoy!  1. You can view my Promapp Process here <iframe src="https://app.box.com/embed/s/3f5127zjh66q4jv4n6v5ddx86y20ob3y?sortColumn=date&view=list" width="500" height="400" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe> 2. The Nintex Workflow Cloud Key - Use this to import this into your tenant is P7iAw1FTL3XXEiqEoSejN9oekMTh845RbQufce18M1mwuMvSvNote: this is valid up until 2 June 2019

You can find Kryon documentation, including release notes, user guides and more, here:RPAProcess Discovery

Moving data with Nintex Workflow Cloud or NWC can be a very simple setup. This is a very common need and use case for Nintex. I have data in one system and when it hits a certain stage or status sync it to this other system. I have seen this come across my desk several times this week so I though I would write about it. I typically refer to workflow setups as magic tricks and this will be no exception. Meaning any example use case I give can completely be shuffled and told in a different order… Ta-Dah! In the example I have pictured below the starting event is a new case record created in Salesforce. Every time I create a new case record I want this workflow to run/fire.  The next step is creating an item in a Sharepoint list. The ending result is below. I created a Salesforce case and the data in pa

Excerpt from: Gaining clarity: how process scoping fuels simplicity  If you were to write a process for grocery shopping, what would it look like? Would it be simple to understand and use? Would it be helpful? Take a moment to think about it. Perhaps you are already thinking about specific conditions. Things like: What items are on the list? What grocery store (or stores) will you need to visit to get those specific items? What day or time of day will you be going? What is your budget? Now, admittedly, I am not an expert at grocery shopping, so this list of conditions might be much longer. The point is, as simple and straightforward as “grocery shopping” may sound, the content and complexity of that process i

I appear to come across the same scenario time and time again.  A request of some sort is made.  It goes through one or multiple lines of approval.  Whilst it is in the approval process the item is set to read only so that no amendments can be made while it is in review.  Upon final approval, the item/document is updated to reflect the approved/rejected status.  The permissions on the item at that point do not allow for this update.  Or upon approval an item is added to another list that the “initiator” does not have access to contribute to.  So I thought I would discuss the different options that can be used for dealing with permissions inside a workflow:Set item permissionsThis action allows you as the workflow designer to decide to inherit or create unique permissions on the current item on which the workflow is running.  This works well in state machine workflows where the permissions at each state need to change (i.e. the current approver needs

We recently upgraded Nintex Forms for SharePoint 2013 and have found suddenly that some forms that have been published and unchanged for ages and broken and won't open in any mode (new, edit or view) because of corrupt or broken people picker fields. The uls logs showed an error similar to:Error=Object reference not set to an instance of an object.   at Nintex.Forms.SharePoint.FormControls.PeoplePickerFormControl.EditModeDataBinding(String value)     at Nintex.Forms.SharePoint.FormControls.PeoplePickerFormControl.OnFormControlDataBinding(Object sender, EventArgs e)     at System.Web.UI.WebControls.CompositeControl.DataBind()     at System.Web.UI.Control.DataBindChildren()     at System.Web.UI.Control.DataBind(Boolean raiseOnDataBinding)     at System.Web.UI.Control.DataBindChildren()The fix came after a call with the amazing Nintex Support (Kavin) who told us to do the following with the people picker controls in question:Ch

In relation to the announcement made by Microsoft regarding SharePoint 2010 workflow retirement for Microsoft 365, Nintex Workflow for Office 365 is not impacted by the SharePoint 2010 workflow retirement. To note:Nintex Workflow for Office 365 is not impacted as it does not leverage the SharePoint 2010 workflow engine to run its workflows. Nintex Workflow On Premises is not impacted as the retirement only applies to Microsoft / Office 365 platform. For more information or assistance, please reach out to Nintex Support.

What is the real calorie burn needed to make my documents automated? This is always a fair question I consider when I demonstrate Nintex Drawloop for Salesforce. “I have a unique scenario.” “We have a complex data model.” “You probably can’t do this.” All fair statements. The truth is… the answer to the calorie burn may be simpler than anticipated.  Let’s talk about those quotes… Statement: “I have a unique scenario.”Response: As all scenarios are different typically the approach is always the same. I need a document generated with data that exists in a system of record like Salesforce and it needs to be delivered in a specific way like eSign, emailed or stored. Shuffle the deck with any process and the story is different but we are all play with the same cards. Meaning we hard a feature f