News and Guidelines

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

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 disabled from clicking on them. So users have to copy and paste them to open their items. If you have an orphaned task, it will appea

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’m going to create a list to track Assets in my organisation and their condition. Take note of the Site Url that the List is saved to, we’ll need this later in Nintex Workflow Cloud.At this point you’ll be able to see the Nintex Forms for Office 365 and Nintex Workflow for Office 365 apps in the List ribbon… that means I can create a New Item form for the list using Nintex and a workflow to autom

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 actually USE one?” you might be asking. Well, for starters you’ve got to actually have a List made before we can reference it. Now, there are quite a few ways to create a List, so let’s break each of them down. ManuallyMake a

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 made to only suit 3-4 approvals which is perfectly fine and exactly how you should use the state machine, however over time processes grow, more and more is added in and eventually you may find instead of having 4 branches, you now have 2 state machines each with 27 branches yes this is a real worl

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 Nintex Workflow to send messages to Twilio so that it can send a text message to the destination on your behalf. Requirements Firstly, you will need an account at Twilio.  Part of that, is that you will get AccountSid and an API Authentication Token.  These are required for successful requests to be sent to Twilio. There is also an important part of sendin

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. See full post here: To automate, or not to automate, that is the question

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 integration with Nintex corporate directory and role based access control.What changes will I notice?The only thing you should notice will be a s

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"     The next screen will provide you with the ID of your tenant.     For those of you who have access to Nintex Forms for Office 365, it works exactly the same way there.

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 impact the way they deliver value. For this to happen, process doers must actually reference and follow company standards. If process standards are presented in ways that discourage engagement, then organizations can expect that process doers will avoid using those standards at all costs – even if that means longer processin

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 need to examine the API. Looking at the documentation, the output is set as audio/mpeg.   For this e

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. My targets are:- To have the child data only in one place (not in XML in the parent list and the duplicate in a child list)- To have the parent "primary key" in the child list to have the relationship in the reporting system (in my case Excel and Power Pivot functionality)- To allow the update of the created child

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 unsightly yard, out of control weeds, and unhappy neighbors – but it did not eliminate the need for me to manage my yard. Despite the large upfront investment, I still had to work to maintain the gains that were made. It is not uncommon for organizations to approach process management like I approached my yard pr

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. It is also important to define responsibilities for the project. Not

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 would get around these limitations by generating a document that is attached to an email. Drawloop docgen does not have limitations for line items or conditional text. But it sometimes just makes more sense to exclude attachments from an email and drive all of that content directly into the message of the email. Well now yo