News and Guidelines

When you start to go down your automation journey a common thing exists. You have parts of the same exact process in many different scenarios. Nintex has a way to avoid recreating the same work over and over. Simply Call another workflow. A way of solving this exists in all environments of workflow. Here is an example… You have hundreds of different contracts you send out. You want to automate the entire process. The first half of this process is always different depending on the use-case… Starting Event or How the process is started? (Forms, CRM, Time Based, Etc…) Systems used Contract used… The list could go on. But in a scenario like this there usually is a common part of the process. The delivery.  Without this feature I am talking about… You would recreate these steps for the delivery… for each contract. Here we always want to do the same things… Sign the document Store the document when completed Notify the CRM the deal closed Message/ Brag on Slack the deal closed Order a Pizza

On this new October release, the "send notification" action have brought two new features that will bring some new capabilites to your Office 365 scenario.Mails can now be sent to external emails Mails can now contain multiple attachementsFrom the release date of this new version, when you will upgrade your app on your tenant, you have this frame that will open Lets make a deep dive in it. Everything we are going to talk about today is the "send an email" Action!                         So let's take a look at the difference between the previous and the new version. basically graphically, you  will see a new parameter below the "Subject"  line. This will allow you to add Email Attachmnents in your email.  In a list Workflow that is launched on an item, you can send attached to your email the listitem attachments by simply checking the "Include Current List Item Attachment" Checkbox.In another hand you can also select a document which is not atached to the item by specifying the direct

Let's take a look at the configuration and the functionality of Workflow Tagging. We'll start in Nintex Workflow Cloud Settings. You should see a new entry called Tags.The first option you will not is 'Allow workflow designer to create tags'. This will be On by default in all tenants and refers to the ability for the designer role to create tags.Add new tags by putting a name and selecting a colour from the Nintex Spring Summer pastel colour palette.With all your tags in place, you can now assign tags to workflows, workflows to tags. On your Workflows Dashboard, select Edit tags from the workflow edit menu. Add the relevant tag(s) here and update. You can also add AdHoc tags here. Tags can also be added on the Publish screen when publishing a workflow. Once your workflows are tagged, you will be able to filter the list using the filter capability and also by clicking on a tag specifically. Back on the Settings - Tags page you can now see workflows have been assigned to tags and from he

The ProblemI recently had a customer ask how they could theme document templates based on certain criteria in a workflow without having to maintain multiple templates. As you can probably imagine, having to update multiple templates when content changes could present a variety of issues. The SolutionUsing Nintex Workflow Cloud to start from, I setup a botflow in Nintex RPA to tweak the looks of the main template for each run of the workflow. Watch this quick video here:  The botflow takes advantage of Word's built in "Theme" functionality. The botflow simply opens the Word document, adjusts the Theme based on the input variable from the workflow, and saves it. Then the workflow continues on to generate the document with the new theme. In my example I kept it simple with an input form, but of course that "Theme" could be determined using any matter of methods. The important part is setting the botflow's Input variable to match what is expected in the List lookups. Short & sweet toda

The Nintex Xtensions framework will allow developers to build custom connectors, using their own preferred code and development environment. Developers will be able to integrate any functionality that is accessible via a REST web call, through secure connection (HTTPS), in the Nintex Cloud Workflow Designer. Using tools like Windows Azure Serverless functions or Amazon Web Services, developers will be able to make their custom connectors available to workflow designers in their Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant. To add a connector to your Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant, follow these steps: Note: In order to access Xtensions within Nintex Workflow Cloud, a user will need to have the Developer role assigned. Open your Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant, and then click Xtensions in the dashboard (left pane). Click on the  to insert a custom connector. Copy https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sdknintex/xtensions_cc_quickstart/master/QuickStart.json Insert the copied link into the Swagger URL input field

There are many examples of files and documents languishing in legacy or onpremises containers and being manually dragged and dropped or browse upload to an end repository. Invoices scanned or emailed to a central location, bills of sale dropped off in the mail, certificates of authentication, transaction receipts and so on.Take a look at your email inbox. In the last week there’s probably been a PDF you’ve received or a spreadsheet you’ve been sent to update or simply store somewhere in the cloud to then work on or share elsewhere as best practice. I believe digitally transforming these use cases should be quick and easy but truly transformational to the business implementing them.So how can we get from the legacy to the cloud, particularly when it comes to documents and files. We’ve seen Nintex RPA Run Workflow explained before, if you haven’t here’s an example - https://youtu.be/UROFnETCkM8 but that’s all text values. How do I get a physical document up there.You’ll need a few things

Now that it's 2016, we felt it was about time to revisit one of the most popular posts in community history. In Part 2, we would like to go deeper into how workflow history affects the performance of your farm, and some best practices on keeping your Nintex database(s) clean and properly maintained. Before going into specifics around how to maintain a database, it is important to know how Nintex Workflow databases work and how they can affect workflow history and performance. The database itself affects all aspects of workflows. Below is a quick description of what happens when you start a workflow: Workflow is initiated by a user or programmatically A lookup is done to see what database is configured for the history to be placed in. (which DB is mapped to the site collection where the workflow is being run)  The SharePoint Workflow Engine compiles and starts the workflow An initial entry is added to the database tables logging the workflow instance ID, siteid, etc.  The workflow Engin

A customer recently asked me how could a form default to the next first Friday of the month. If the current date was passed the first Friday of the month, select the next month. A complex idea, but I found a way to solve this through a complex formula. The video explains how to solve this, or the formula is included below if you wanted to reuse the example, or download the example form. ifElse(formatdate(dateadd("Days",0,dateNow()),"ddd") == "Fri" && converttonumber(formatdate(dateadd("Days",0,dateNow()),"D")) < 8, dateadd("Days",0,dateNow()),ifElse(formatdate(dateadd("Days",1,dateNow()),"ddd") == "Fri" && converttonumber(formatdate(dateadd("Days",1,dateNow()),"D")) < 8, dateadd("Days",1,dateNow()),ifElse(formatdate(dateadd("Days",2,dateNow()),"ddd") == "Fri" && converttonumber(formatdate(dateadd("Days",2,dateNow()),"D")) < 8, dateadd("Days",2,dateNow()),ifElse(formatdate(dateadd("Days",3,dateNow()),"ddd") == "Fri" && converttonumber(formatdate(

Combining all aspects of process automation has been the Nintex north star since we acquired RPA technology house Enablesoft back in 2019. There's true value (and sense) in combining the linear, task driven, quick impact Robotic Process Automation capability with a dynamic, state driven, human centric Digital Process Automation practice. Calling a Nintex Workflow from a Nintex RPA botflow is already native to the product, let's take a look at how we've flipped that on it's head and closed the loop with the Nintex Gateway.The Nintex Gateway, as per our release notes: "Start an RPA job that will run an unattended Botflow as part of your workflow". There is ALOT to unpack in that one simple sentence, in this blog I'll focus on the set up and configuration of the Nintex Gateway to get to a functional stage calling a Botflow from a Workflow, but as a takeway or action on you the reader is to explore the two arenas we're bringing together here with Nintex Workflow and Nintex RPA. One such us

Click HERE to view a recorded webinar by Ayelet Gazit, on the newest software release, 20.3.The webinar was recorded on April 7th, 2020. Answers to questions raised on the webinar:Do we still need the AD admin for setting up the AD access? - Yes, in order to be able to connect to AD and get all the relevant information Can you customize "success rate" on Kryon Console? - At this version it is a fixed calculation During the installation of PD can we use Microsoft Software Center ? - It is on the road-map. We do support automatic deployment using scripts / images etc

The other day I had someone reach out to me asking me how to add clickable hyperlinks to their agreements. I began searching the web and was able to find hyperlink tags for Agreements. This was helpful, but as I tested things didn't work as I expected. In this article I will go over points that I stumbled across so creating hyperlinks in your Agreements will be much easier.  Here is the documentation that you will find on Adobe's site for creating hyperlinks for Agreements. The tag that I used was {{companywebsite_es_:link(http://www.adobe.com):label(Adobe)}}But this needs to be broken down a bit.companywebsite - This is the field Name and can be changed es - This is required it is the Idendtifier for AdobeSign link - This is required it tells Adobesign a Link will follow. label - This is required this is the text that will be shown to the user when an agreement is created. Problems I faced and how I resolved them: Hyperlink not populating into the agreement. This may be due to the tex

One of the major differences between Nintex Workflow for SharePoint Server and Nintex Workflow for Office 365 (online) is that the latter does not support third-party workflow actions.  This means that, while The Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint on-premise includes a wide array of workflow actions for Nintex workflow, The Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online cannot take advantage of these in the same way. Now, this doesn’t mean that you cannot use Nintex Workflow for Office 365 with The Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint Online, it just means that when authoring Nintex workflows, the editor will not automatically show Muhimbi’s custom workflow actions. Muhimbi has an excellent article on how to use Nintex Workflow for Office 365 to Convert and Merge documents, you may want to read that before continuing as it provides a great background for the rest of this article. The workaround linked to above works very well,  but embedding the REST based Conversion logic in business w

What’s new in this version? Introducing a beautiful new set of Process Discovery logos!  Now you can download information from discovered processes and their selected variants to an Event Log, in csv format. The Event Log is easily imported into process mining tools, to enrich process findings with detailed discovered execution steps.  We’ve added an option to give names to windows and objects from the Process Map > Action Properties pane, for improved readability and ease of editing when sent to automation. The MaxDistanceBetweenVariants parameter is back at user’s request on the AI Engine page in PD Admin. It determines when similar variants are considered a single process. 

  Just follow the next steps. Open Nintex form Select Code NWF$(".nCAF-library-ribbon").hide();   

Onboarding at ScaleWithin the world of software as a service (SaaS), onboarding a new customer is hands down one of the most important events that can happen in the customer lifecycle. For customers, it is an exciting moment where they get to learn how to start using this piece of software that they just purchased (sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars), and for vendors, it is an opportunity to put the best foot forward and show that they can provide value for their customers. For many smaller companies, most onboarding is done through direct engagement, and is often run by an onboarding, training, or project manager that is responsible for helping get the customer to their first success milestone as quickly as possible. On the other hand, with many larger companies with a high volume of new customers, trying to assign an employee to engage directly with every single new customer simply is not feasible. Companies will segment their customers into “high/low touch” (those with direc

Nintex Workflow Cloud (or “NWC” for short) is a powerful workflow solution that allows you to easily reach outside systems and have all of those separate siloed systems work as one. There for sure is a common thread of use cases on how our solution is used but… I am NOT going to talk about those use cases here. I am going to focus on use cases that were not intended and show how flexible NWC can be. Personally, I have a great example of a non typical workflow I use EVERY DAY…  With my role at Nintex one of my responsibilities is to do many demonstrations live and virtually. When performing one of my main demos it uses many different systems. I do this to show the flexibility of Nintex. In short I have a demo that takes data out of Salesforce and places it into a word document with DocGen to route through a redline process that eventually gets pushed though eSigniture and finally is stored in Salesforce and a specific folder in Box… While all of that is happening… Salesforce is being up

Introducing Workflow Testing for Nintex Workflow Cloud. An intra workflow testing capability to validate the workflow design and build.Let’s have a look at the function in more detail. There is a simple pre-requisite to lighting up the feature within a workflow and that is at least one Save event on the workflow. What this means is you can now test your Draft workflows without having to go through the Publish and Manual Start process. So now that’s done, we should have our Workflow testing option available.With the below workflow ready to test, let’s see what happens:It is worth mentioning at this point, any unconfigured actions in the workflow design will ‘fail’ the workflow test so should be configured before workflow testing. Treat this as a run of the workflow design.Because I have a Form as my start event, I’m being prompted to complete the fields within that form, just like an end user. A component workflow start event would ask for any Start Event variables you have configured.O

IntroductionThis is another question that I’ve run into more than few times over the years: “How do I interact with this date field? It won’t let me type anything, I can only pick the date from the pop out menu.” And the truth about it is that there is no concrete answer on how to interact with these types of controls. Each of them is built differently and each will need to be handled differently. Lucky for us, the Date/Time field in Nintex Workflow Cloud Forms is a perfect example of this question. In this blog, I’ll go over how to handle this field in NWC Forms and hopefully provide enough information in order for you to take the methods and apply them to the date fields in your business application. This relies heavily on another topic I posted about previously, manipulating the Rules of an action. If you’re unfamiliar with this topic and haven’t read my other blog post about it, check it out here.  This is the field in question that I need to send a date value to. If you’re unfamil

Sometimes when managing Person or Group variables and fields we need to fetch specific attributes from that entity. For example, what if I want to retrieve the Login Name of a user, or their email, display name, or ID? This can be done easily by using an easy to overlook functionality known as the Format Value function, or Return Type function. It is noted as a small orange icon with an FX as a arithmetic function symbol. This function is available in many configurations of fields within actions. As seen below in the Send Notification action, I am specifying a workflow variable pnManager to be the value of the TO: field to send an email to a user. I can click on the icon to specify a return value. The options available in o365​ are Display Name, Email Address, Login Name, and User ID Number. To send a notification to someone, I do not need to specify the return type as Email Address as this will be handled for me. But in the case that I need to save this to a Single Line of Text variab

Have you submitted your nomination for the 2020 Nintex Solution Innovation Awards yet? If you haven’t – good news, we’re extending the nomination deadline to April 3rd to give you more time. Nominations are open to any public or private sector organization that uses Nintex, whether that’s a single Nintex capability or a combination of capabilities including Nintex Promapp®, Nintex RPA®, Nintex Drawloop DocGen® for Salesforce, Sign powered by Adobe Sign, Nintex Workflow, Nintex Forms, and Nintex Mobile. The nomination process is easy: We want to know who you are, what capabilities you’re using, how you’re using them, and why. You can download a copy of the nomination form to draft your nomination here. Why should I enter?The Nintex Solution Innovation Awards are your chance to be recognized for the impact you’ve made transformation the way people work with Nintex. Whether you are a Nintex customer or partner – you have reason to enter. #1: Be publicly recognized for your Nintex skillsTh

The other day I had a customer ask if they could have a field to enter Celsius and have it calculate Fahrenheit.  Without hesitation I replied, "Absolutly" and quickly proceeded to build an example of how to do it.  This post is a quick run down of how I did it.  It is super basic, but great for those that are calculating values on a Nintex Workflow Cloud Form for the first time.  Step 1Go to the form designer inside of Nintex Workflow Cloud. Add the Number type control to the form and set it to Decimal and Automatic. Step 2Create a Decimal Variable and place your formula inside of the variable. This example is a sum variable that looks like this.  sum([Form].[Enter Celcius]*1.8)+32   Step 3Add the Label control to the form and inside of the text area add your variable Step 4Test it out.   Feel free to watch the video below to see a walkthrough of how I did it. 

Most of us must have come across challenge where forms in Sharepoint Online is taking a much longer time than expected to load. This could be caused by different factors, and one of the factors is believed to be the custom list size, especially the number of columns you have in your list. Based on official document, the number of column limits can be up to 276 for the Single-line-of-text coloumn, but when come to performance it might not be a good idea to have your custom list designed to have such a big number of columns.  Based on the experiences of one of my partners, by reducing the number of columns for one of the problematic forms from 100+ columns to below 50 columns, the performance has improved from around 20 seconds to below 10 seconds to load the form. Reducing the number of fields for a form to below 50 is not viable most of the time, so how could be reduce the required number of columns for a list but still have as many form fields as required? well, the answer is not to l

I am going to share configuration examples of Execute SQL and Web Request workflow actions for Office 365. The example I used is based on the previous post by Dan Stoll on Sign your name across my heart and my previous post on Extending Nintex Mobile Signature control to desktop/browser to demonstrate how the Nintex Signature Control example could be used for a Shipping or Delivery Order scenario of business process. I have simply modified the Title control to enable the barcode scanning feature, and renamed the label to Item ID as shown in the below setting of the Title (i.e. Single Line Textbox control).The outcome of that is shown in the diagram below, which could be used as a Delivery Form to which a delivery man could use to scan the Bar code or QR Code of a parcel or item delivered, and get the consignee to sign the Delivery Form for confirming the parcel/items have been delivered.Once the form data had been submitted and sync back to the Sharepoint on Office 365, a workflow will

 I am trying to create a cascading drop down in Nintex Form, but the filtering by a control’s value its not working (the filter works by a specified value).The control works perfectly on our site, but not at the site of a customer. This is the XML error that occurs when the page loads <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">  <head>    <title>Request Error</title>    <style>BODY { color: #000000; background-color: white; font-family: Verdana; margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; } #content { margin-left: 30px; font-size: .70em; padding-bottom: 2em; } A:link { color: #336699; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; } A:visited { color: #6699cc; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; } A:active { color: #336699; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; } .heading1 { ba

I was asked recently to explain how Microsoft Flow could be integrated with Nintex Workflow Cloud. The point of the question was that Workflow Cloud provides enterprise level workflow capability, so it supports custom workflow connectors via the OpenAPI/Swagger definitions. In this article I'll explain how we can integrate Nintex Workflow Cloud and Microsoft Flow, leveraging the Nintex Workflow Cloud's Xtension framework to sync Microsoft Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. Calling Nintex Workflow Cloud from Microsoft Flow1. To call Nintex Workflow Cloud from Microsoft Flow, I have created a Nintex Workflow Cloud workflow with an external start event as shown here. I have also included parameters I want to bring over from Outlook Event to sync with Google Calendar Event (in this example, Event Title, location, ID, Start date-time and End date-time). 2. Once the workflow is published, it gives us details on how the workflow could be triggered from external system(s). What we need fro