News and Guidelines

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 ent

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" &

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

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 Idendtif

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 

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 MaxDistanceBetweenVari

  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.

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

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’

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

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.

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 nominatio

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 

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 require

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 cont

 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="htt

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).

In my role as a sales engineer, I come across many unique use cases that are new to me but may apply to other organizations. The subject of this blog involves a prospect that wanted to have approvals as part of a workflow but route them based on the starting character of a string. The prospect was in Education and the administration of the school wanted to route approvals based on the starting character of a Student’s last name filled in a Petition Form using Nintex Workflow Cloud. There were a collection of counselors that oversaw students based on their last name starting with A-F,G-M,N-T, and U-Z. Doing this type of routing takes a bit of craftiness, but can be done using the following actions.         Apply a Regular Expression – This action is needed to extract the first character of the string. The input value should be the field/control from the Nintex form you want to use as the basis of r

Introduction“I am trying to login to Nintex RPA but it isn’t letting me in! What do I do?” This is a question I’ve gotten a lot since the release of Nintex RPA Central - and honestly, it is a pretty loaded question. There are a lot of pieces to look into when someone asks this question. Let’s take a look into each of these pieces and walk through how you can troubleshoot this problem on your own. I am going into this assuming that all the installation instructions have been followed, found here. The ProblemA new user opens Nintex RPA and is met with a login screen. Upon entering their credentials, an error message is

 When moving to the cloud, the identification of what content needs to be migrated, and understanding if associated workflows can be supported, is a complex process. The success or failure of any migration to the cloud often hinges on proper pre-migration planning and strong management throughout the project. For existing Nintex users moving from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online and into Nintex for Office 365, Quest now offers even greater capabilities and services for migrating SharePoint content, Nintex workflows and now forms, up to the cloud.  If you haven't yet heard about the Customer Loyalty Program (CLP), it is an incredible offer that the team here at Nintex has put together for current on-prem maintenance customers to help them make the move to our subscription platform in the cloud. As part of the CLP Nint

New Features and EnhancementsProcess Discovery AdminIntroducing the Process Discovery Admin (formerly the Orchestrator)  New Discovery page (formerly, "Pipe") and AI Engine page (formerly, "Algo Settings")  The default value of MinShowsPerVariant has been changed to 1 (instead of 2)  Robot RecordingImproved process mapping for emulator applications  ArchitectureThe installation folder default has changed  Bug FixesAfter log-out, the application does not kill the session properly  Incorrect username in Discovered Process Report User recordings after disable --> enable robot not saved Wrong process count when using multiple tenants  For more information- refer to the attached document. 

Sometimes it's needed to count some characters on a string on a Nintex Workflow This sample shows how to calculate it with 3 actions. The used actions are:  I set a variable named myString with the value 123-1234-12345    Then I create the following variables      Firstly I count the total characters on my string using the action named "Convert Value"   Then I count the characters deleting the character you want to count ("-" (hyphen) in this case) , from the string

In this article, we have provided an interactive guide using Nintex Promapp that walks you through a step-by-step process for the Know-Your-Workflow script. This process shows you how to download, run, and generate your workflow consumption reports within your SharePoint on-premise environment. However, if you are not familiar with the Know Your Workflow script, it's recommended to review this article prior to proceeding: Introducing the Know Your Workflow Script. Nintex Promapp Process: Run the KYWF Script